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 )

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

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

Oft-fired conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, less than two years removed from calling Donald Trump “a wonderful person,” has dropped a new grift, claiming on a recent podcast that he will no longer support the Republican Party. He wasn’t gentle about his “I’m out” declaration. “I don’t share their values on any level,” Carlson said on the June 18 episode of the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast. “Their personal values, the way they live, greedy, bizarro sex lives, loyal to a foreign country above the United States, it’s like everything I dislike. Beginning with the speaker of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, and extending to the president and the leaders in the Senate, I have nothing in common with these people at all. I do not share their values, I find their priorities appalling and so I…  ( 13 min )

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 )

Way back on March 6, not long after President Donald Trump hurled America into the dumbest war imaginable, our Nobel-Peace-Prize-deficient leader declared on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” That was about the same time he said America’s “excursion” into Iran would take “four to five weeks” and “won’t be difficult.” More than 14 weeks, thousands of lost lives and billions upon billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars later, it appears America is the one surrendering. Trump is promoting an Iran peace deal that isn't actually a deal The Trump administration is, of course, spinning an “agreement” with Iran as a peace deal, something it clearly is not. At the moment, the language of the agreement ‒ slated to be officially signed later this week ‒ hasn’t…  ( 14 min )

The easily influenced influencers in the Make America Healthy Again crowd are livid that the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller, rejecting a lawsuit that claimed the herbicide causes cancer. And they're feeling betrayed by the president they supported, Donald Trump, because he and his Department of Justice sided with Bayer, the company that bought out longtime Roundup-maker Monsanto. MAHA influencer Alex Clark decried the court’s June 25 decision on social media: “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a STUNNING betrayal.” MAHA activist Alexandra Muñoz posted on Instagram: “The DOJ’s support of this case has betrayed the American people.”  Vani Hari, a MAHA mom who blogs as “The Food Babe,” poste…  ( 14 min )

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

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” arrives in theaters this week. And if you thought that “Oppenheimer” was the most Christopher Nolan movie that Christopher Nolan could possibly make, let this serve as either an exciting tease or a stern warning: You ain’t seen squat. Blessed with a reported $250 million budget, the Oscar-winning director has used Homer’s Greek epic to amplify (somehow) all of his trademark directorial tics. Is this movie long? Dude, it is SO long. Does the story center around a taciturn fellow (Matt Damon, never better) who’s got some heavy s—t going on? Absolutely. Do we get a plot timeline that’s been chopped and screwed? Very much so. Is the sound mix deafening, to the point of pain, and are entire swaths of dialogue still not comprehensible despite that loudness? (My …  ( 1 min )

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 )

body,a{word-break:break-word;}.feed__title a{text-decoration:underline;}img[data-emoji]{height:1.2em;width:1.2em;vertical-align:middle;}table{border-collapse:collapse;}.headline h1,.paragraph h1,.text-element h1{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h2,.paragraph h2,.text-element h2{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h3,.paragraph h3,.text-element h3{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h4,.paragraph h4,.text-element h4{font-size:20px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h5,.paragraph h5,.text-element h5{font-size:18px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h6,.paragraph h6,.text-element h6{font-size:16px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline p,.paragraph p,.text-element p{line-height:1.5;margin:0;}.headline div,.paragraph div,.text-element div{line-height:1.5;m…  ( 3 min )

Let Me Count The Ways, LeBron James 96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit …  ( 9 min )

-I’m going live tonight — save your spot- 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 …  ( 3 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @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% } T…  ( 2 min )

Trump lies, loses and escalates. Watch what comes next. 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 )

A short essay on why the process of vetting candidates is so important

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET

The original version of this article was published in The Nation on July 13. When I first heard the 2026 World Cup was about to begin, I barely paid attention. This was partially because of the timing—most matches this year have aired late at night in Gaza because of the time difference with the United States—but mostly because I couldn't imagine how anyone here would watch the games.  ( 28 min )

Many new species have been announced this week. There are new mites from Saudi Arabia and a new weevil from Japan. There are new midges from China and new spiders from Brazil and China. There is a new dragonfly from Vietnam, a new jewel beetle from Borneo, and a grasshopper from Ecuador. Each of these creatures is no doubt beautiful in their own right. And yet, none of them are monkeys. Seemingly every week science announces new midges, new spiders, new spineless hopping things that hadn't been described because they are so small and elusive. It is not every week that science announces an animal so big and charismatic and closely related to us. It is not every week that science announces a new monkey. New monkey! When you got under the covers last night, could you have imagined that just t…  ( 25 min )

As an anxious and judgmental person whose standards for interpersonal etiquette and social niceties might best be described as Austenesque, I can confidently say: Every wedding is rife with social crimes. I’ve seen more than my share of dads make speeches about mawwiage, and I’ve seen a few chill brides set everyone in their vicinity tiptoeing (often rightly so), and I’ve watched whole tables full of relatives seethe about their placement. As far as I’m concerned, weddings encourage self-caricature. The wedding at the center of today’s gossip is no exception. We’ve got a backyard ceremony, some previously cordial neighbors, and a pair of grooms determined to make up for two years of social isolation with the celebration of a lifetime. Almost everyone is gay and almost everyone contributes to making this party (an) unforgettable (mess). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGCAIKDzdI  ( 15 min )

Taking care to avoid the team-picking system of our schoolyard memories, Lilah Maravi divided us into two sides of about 20. It was a pleasant Sunday in June—Father’s Day—and we had gathered at our usual spot for our Pride month game. After a spontaneous game of catch in a Brooklyn park in 2023, Lilah had started this monthly pickup series with a Field of Dreams-esque compulsion to get trans women together to play baseball. That might sound counterintuitive. Many of us were unathletic youths, and many of us make significant efforts to distance ourselves from an image of masculinity. Add in transphobic campaigns to exclude us from women’s and girls sports, and it leaves few opportunities for trans women to enjoy being on a field. It was going to be up to people like Lilah and her friends to make it possible for baseball to be for us. The first game, in April 2023 at East River Park, drew not quite enough players for two full teams. Since then, we’ve moved fields (I’m leaving out where and when exactly, but if you want to play with us, you can find us) and found that way more girls wanted to play baseball than we had expected. At least once a month from April to October, as many as 50 players take turns on the diamond as friends chat, cheer, and grill hot dogs on the sidelines.  ( 42 min )

Aliyah Boston's teammate drives so much of the American population insane that it's easy to forget her own talent for getting in other people's heads. Opposing bigs unravel next to her. Jonquel Jones, possibly the nicest and humblest athlete I've ever spoken to, revealed the limits of her patience two years ago when she tussled with Boston in the Indiana Fever's home opener. Expect a technical foul or two whenever Boston and Brittney Griner play. Remember Boston's playoff spat with Brionna Jones? These bigs might tell you their beef has to do with Boston's prodigious use of elbows in the post. Kelsey Plum's impression of her, done all in good fun at Unrivaled, involved a pair of violent oblique twists before the shot attempt.  There were no techs or flaring tempers Sunday night, but Boston's skill and physicality made A'ja Wilson the latest victim of a Boston brain boom. In the Fever's 109-75 beatdown of the Las Vegas Aces, Wilson had maybe the worst game of her season, finishing 9-of-23 from the field while Boston went 9-of-14. (Granted, Wilson's worst still looks like 20 points, 12 boards, and a couple of blocks.) Unable to get to her spots against Boston, the reigning MVP had to take more jumpers than she wanted. "Twenty-three shots I took—I was probably happy with two of them," Wilson said after the game. When head coach Becky Hammon yanked the starters with a little under five minutes to play, they'd only managed to score four points in the fourth quarter.  ( 23 min )

We'll start with the most significant play of the 2026 MLB All-Star Game: a hit batsman. In the top of the third, with a man on first and the AL already leading 3-0, Tampa's Junior Caminero got smacked on the hand by a 98-mph pitch from St. Louis's Riley O’Brien. Caminero was replaced by a pinch runner as he left to get X-rays, and immediately the day's earlier news that the owners would try to force players to participate in the 2028 Olympics looked even more ridiculous. While Caminero's examination yielded relief, indicating he should be able to play for the Rays on Friday, the wait for that announcement dampened what was already an alternately dull and maudlin atmosphere in Philadelphia, where scores of empty seats were visible on the broadcast before the AL finished off their 4-0 win. Sometimes a baseball game just isn't exciting. That's always going to be an inherent risk. But Tuesday night didn't do itself any favors with its mid-game musical breaks, which made for an exhaustively self-serious affair. They stopped for a recording of Ray Charles's "America The Beautiful," which Jennifer Hudson had already performed in the pregame, then later broke for Boyz II Men to do “I’ll Be There” as part of Mastercard's anti-cancer ad, and still we had to sit through "God Bless America." America 250 is ostensibly a birthday party, but birthday parties are supposed to be upbeat and fun. It felt like MLB was throwing a wake. At least we'll always have the goofy incongruity of Ernie Clement, in a jersey that says "Toronto," signing a Declaration of Independence–looking document as part of the starting lineup announcements. Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images  ( 18 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, Drew talks about danger.  ( 24 min )

Having sat with Spain's 2-0 victory over France in the World Cup semifinal for several hours now, I am left with an overwhelming sense of relief. Not because Spain won or France lost, but because the game's second goal was as beautiful as it was. Whether or not you watched the game, you need to do yourself a favor and watch this goal several more times before the day is done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBOIka9sXlQ  ( 20 min )

I had reconsidered my stance on Jinx and decided to give it a serious try. The only problem I had was that picking the correct spelling wasn’t working as advertised. I speculated that this was probably the result of some interaction between Jinx and Ivy and this, indeed, turned out to be the case. Embarrassingly, mbork had already pointed this out in his post about Jinx that I linked to but since I wasn’t planning on installing Jinx, I hadn’t paid it much attention. His solution was simple: he merely disabled Ivy for Jinx by advising jinx-correct. That works fine but I’m not sure that I like that behavior either. You have to press Tab to get the list corrections and then it isn’t any easier choose the right one. I’m sure there’s something simple that I’m missing so I’ll continue experimenting or perhaps one of Irreal’s more knowledgeable readers will tell me I’m just being stupid. In any event, I’m going back to the original behavior until I can figure out the correct way of fixing things.  ( 5 min )

Two weeks ago I wrote that CIDER 2.0 was brewing. Today the brew is ready - CIDER 2.0 (“Terceira”)1 is officially out! I promised the release would follow the preview within a week or two if nothing serious surfaced, and for once in my life I’m actually on schedule. The preview post covered the big themes in detail - the transient menus, the call-graph browsers, cider-macrostep, the revamped tracing and enlighten, the ClojureScript improvements - so I won’t rehash all of that here. Instead I’ll focus on what changed between the preview and the release, and on the bigger picture of what CIDER 2.0 is actually about. What CIDER 2.0 is about Looking back at the (enormous) changelog, the release boils down to four themes: Tackle some ambitious ideas that had been lying dormant for ages - inline…  ( 9 min )

A doctor, a judge, a torn-down prison, and a 16-year dictatorship that just ended overseas

The Acting Attorney General Has Continued to Act Like Donald Trump’s Personal Attorney and Should Not Be Confirmed

Graham Platner has already quit the race to be the next senator from Maine, but defenses of the once-rising Democrat are only growing. Many of them aren’t coming from the progressives who had boosted the working class oyster farmer-turned-politician, but from people who typically loathe the left. “Most every guy I know did what he’s being accused of at one point or another with their girlfriend at some point after a night of drinking,” complained the Donald Trump-loving comedian Adam Carolla on Sunday’s episode of his eponymous podcast. “It’s basically like: I’m drunk, I’m horny, I weigh 50 pounds more than you, we’re gonna have sex, it’s not really rape because we sleep in the same bed.” Platner officially dropped out of his race on July 10 after Jenny Racicot, an ex-partner, accused him …  ( 7 min )

Junior Caminero just got hit on his left lower two fingers, the digits getting caught between the ball and the knob of the bat. Caminero was down in pain for a bit, then got up and ran to the dugout. He’s out of the game, and we’ll wait to hear if the fingers suffered any […]  ( 25 min )

Cody Bellinger and Ben Rice of the Yankees deliver two-out singles up the middle in the top of the first inning of the All-Star game. Bellinger came up with the bases loaded and drove in two runs, Rice one run. The AL takes an early 3-0 lead off Phillies pitcher Cristopher Sanchez.  ( 25 min )

I’m catching up after a long day on the road. Congratulations to Jordan Walker on winning the Home Run Derby. I only got to see the first two rounds last night. During the second round, one of the announcers noticed that Walker was swinging smart. He wasn’t trying to drive the ball as far as […]  ( 25 min )

One day out: Inside this Supreme Court’s term with the experts who know it best 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 )

Expect a ton of election conspiracy nonsense in Trump's national address a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

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

The media has one job Thursday night: Tell the truth about Trump's lies a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 4 min )

Go beyond the headlines, subscribe to WIRED today /* 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 )

If the Court wants more public resources, it should show some understanding of what it owes the public in return. The post Justices Ask Congress For More Supreme Court Funding, Less Accountability appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

The shooting death of Tyrin Johnson is the predictable consequence of the legal system letting Trump turn the American military against Americans. The post Judges Paved the Way For the Killing of Tyrin Johnson In Memphis appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Was great to host Brian on the day his new book launched - do consider buying it today!

I'm hosting Brian Tyler Cohen today live at 415pm ET. We will be talking about his new book, the current moment and more.....join us!

And another TACO Tuesday passes us by.  ( 71 min )

This administration’s obsession with violence has gone too far—and I’m afraid we’ll never see the end of it.  ( 74 min )

When I think of it, I always return to a certain Senate-hearing exchange.  ( 70 min )

Still working with Claude on my Emacs settings as a reference. Need to start a new session, so asked it to write a summary with instructions on how I like it to help me. It wrote this: I know it’s complementing me on purpose, but that emphasized why? That’s why my blog is called this way 😉  ( 2 min )

Watch on YouTube C'est merveilleux ! Prot a répondu à ma vidéo et il adhère à mon idée folle d'essayer des conversations sur Emacs avec d'autres personnes en français, malgré mon niveau débutant. Prot est aussi en train de pratiquer son expression orale, donc c'est parfait. Comme Prot l'a dit, je dois parler sans peur. Tout le monde est patient, et si on n'est pas patient, on peut partir. ;) Voulez-vous parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi ? Je pense que ce sera comme mes conversations Emacs Chat en anglais. L'objectif est principalement le partage de chouettes idées sur votre flux de travail et votre configuration, au lieu de se focaliser sur moi. Je devrais donc pouvoir survivre avec mon français. Peut-être que le chat web me sauvera si je suis bloquée. Je peux probablement aller loin a…  ( 2 min )

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve been running across the Jinx spelling corrector everywhere. I had never heard of it until last week when I watched and wrote about Prot’s video on writing in foreign languages with Emacs. Then Marcin Borkowski wrote about it and I posted about that. In all those instances, I concluded that Jinx was interesting but mainly of use for those who regularly wrote in more than one language. Since I seldom do that, I decided I was going to stick with flyspell. Then Omar commented on my Borkowski post saying that Jinx was a better solution than flyspell even if you used it with only one language. I thought that perhaps I should reconsider my decision about sticking with flyspell. Finally, I saw this post by Bozhidar Batsov on why he has recently switched from flyspell to Jinx and became convinced that I should give it a try. I installed it without difficulty and am writing this post with it as a sort of maiden voyage. So far, everything seems fine. By default, jinx-correct is bound to Meta+$, which I find a little clumsy so I changed that to Ctrl+;, which is where my muscle memory thinks it should be. The only problem I’ve had is quickly choosing the correction. The documentation says that you can do that put typing the number of the correction but that simply exits the correction leaving the old spelling in place. The problem may be some interaction with Ivy, which I’ll investigate as soon as I get some time.  ( 5 min )

Yesterday I published a post about Jinx, where I mentioned in passing that dropping Flyspell freed up C-. and C-; for embark, and that this would be a topic for another article. Well, here it is! Embark has been around for quite a few years, and pretty much everyone in the vertico/consult crowd swears by it. Somehow I never got around to adopting it until my recent config overhaul, and now I keep asking myself why I waited so long. So, What’s Embark? Embark, written by Omar Antolín Camarena, is often described as a keyboard-driven right-click menu for Emacs, and I think that’s a pretty apt description. You point it at something - a minibuffer candidate, a file name, a URL, a symbol - press C-. (embark-act) and you get a menu of actions that make sense for that particular thing. A few examp…  ( 5 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:1  ( 2 min )

Just a few days ago, Human Emacs was published: a declaration signed by more than 50 people from the community, led by technomancy, announcing that if GNU ends up accepting LLM-generated contributions in Emacs, they are prepared to maintain a fork free of AI-generated code. They have also opened a mailing list to discuss the topic and a chat channel on Libera Chat. Naturally, debates have appeared elsewhere too, such as Hacker News, Lobsters and Reddit. The debate is on. I notice a lot of tension in the community. Every time I leave a comment in a thread supporting some point contrary to Human Emacs, I receive downvotes and flags for off-topic, spam, troll and unkind. That is why I thought it appropriate to develop my opinion on my blog, where there is room for nuance without the pressure …  ( 4 min )

This past Friday in Vegas, while many players were in town for NBA Summer League action, Miami Heat big man Bam Adebayo got in some kind of fight with his recently departed teammate Tyler Herro. In last month's trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Heat sent Herro to the Milwaukee Bucks, ending his seven-year stint alongside Adebayo. The fight between them took place in the morning, in a practice court at a hotel; later that day but before news broke of the fight, Herro said in an interview that "it's all love" with his former team. As with any event described by the NBA media, the details of this story took on many forms and involved many imperfect synonyms. So what exactly happened in last weekend's scuffle? That depends on who you ask. ESPN's Shams Charania, who broke the story, put it like this:  ( 21 min )

Lindsey Graham's sudden death has elicited plenty of nauseating remembrances from his colleagues in the Senate, none of whom seemed to be all that ashamed to speak and write warmly about a guy whose life's work was bigotry and warmongering. But no tribute has been as bone-chilling as the one offered up last night by Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker. Here's how Parker decided to remember the man she used to cover while working for The New York Times: Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics, I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite… I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the NYT when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened in Charleston. It was summer, but I was wearing pants and a sweater that day because it was always SO freezing in the Capitol. Anyhow, news of the shooting came down, and the DC Bureau chief called me with an order: Get yourself to Charleston ASAP and glue yourself to Graham’s side. She wanted a piece on the senator grappling with the unimaginable. So I headed straight to the airport, arriving in Charleston with just my backpack and what I’d be wearing to work that day, and linked up with Graham. He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours. And he looked at me, with amused distaste, and said: “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” (He was not wrong; I was sweaty and gross). So I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him, resulting in this piece (which, for reasons not worth getting into, ended up being fairly different than the original assignment).  ( 16 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about dipping pizza crust, worst great athletes, wheelchair envy, and more. Your letters: Charlie:  ( 50 min )

In the movie Citizen Vigilante, the latest Uwe Boll provocation that's gaining attention from the far-right side of the internet, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, an American vigilante righting the wrongs of Europe's woke-and-broken criminal justice system. Why an American has deemed himself worthy of this task, let's not ask that question ... or too many others. When he's not out patrolling the streets, Sanders makes his living as a landlord. One sequence of scenes shows Sanders in one moment mounting a one-man assault on an entire police force, and in the next he's having a meeting with the staff of his real estate business to get a rundown on his properties. There's something so rich about making the hero/antihero of your vigilante fantasy not just a murderous do-gooder, but a landlo…  ( 34 min )

Grab a stool, take a seat, and get ready to learn about cyclospora.  ( 26 min )

Is there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? Give me all of them: Your künstlerromans, your campus novels, your NYCs, your MFAs. I didn’t go to Iowa, but I’ve read so many recollections of the program that sometimes I think I might have. The pleasures of the genre arise in part from how its entrants play with certain tropes: the struggle to find one’s voice, the anxiety of influence, the labor of constructing an identity, the implicit resolution promised by the book the reader holds in their hands. A key figure in this artistic coming-of-age is the charismatic teacher. The writing teacher is both a vision of a possible future and that future’s arbiter; maybe the first authority to give—or withhold—permission for the student to keep going. The stake…  ( 29 min )

AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France is the most competitive sleep environment in sports? "Probably, yeah," answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost's Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every day for nearly a month, and they spend almost every night at a different hotel. There are only two days off, so they must recover from one day's effort before the next day's racing starts the next morning. If you don't sleep, you can't race. One of Greenwell's primary responsibilities at the Tour is making sure the riders are getting enough high-quality sleep every night. On the first rest day of the Tour de France, I caught up with him and Walid Karim, an EF staffer responsible for assembling the team's sleep apparatuses, because I wanted to know how they managed it. Sleep is a whole-day effort, and EF uses some bed technology I'd never heard of before that seems extremely effective. Last year, a staffer told me they averaged over eight hours and 15 minutes of sleep, per rider, per night. The attention given to somnial matters has increased drastically in the recent past. Greenwell joined the team 10 years ago, after stints with Great Britain's Olympic swimming and triathlon programs, and his time in the sport is contemporary with the sleep revolution. "Basically, you just had what you were given," he says of the way things were done when he joined, describing "typical French hotels with these long bolster pillows, that are just so uncomfortable."  ( 31 min )

Stacks & Queues, Django F-Expressions, MCP Clients, and More body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100% !important; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } img,a img{ border:0; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ margin:0; padding:0; } p{ margin:1em 0; padding:0; } a{ word-wrap:break-word; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass,.ExternalClass p,.ExternalClass span,.ExternalClass font,.ExternalClass td,.ExternalClass div{ line-height:100%; …  ( 5 min )

The Royals announced Tuesday that they’ve acquired right-hander Easton McGee from the Brewers in exchange for cash. McGee, who’d been designated for assignment last week, has been optioned to Triple-A Omaha with his new organization. The Royals opened a 40-man roster spot by transferring righty Nick Mears from the 15-day IL to the 60-day IL. […]  ( 6 min )

A prosecutor went around the DOJ, a judge voided Trump’s $1.8 billion scheme—and that’s just the start

Trump has always abused the law. Today, a judge said no. 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 …  ( 3 min )

Trump uses Lindsey Graham’s death to push anti-voting bill 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 )

Part One: The Birth of the Mothership (1941–1964) Rock history has produced countless innovators, but very few musicians completely rewrote the language of popular music. Chuck Berry gave rock and roll its swagger. James Brown transformed rhythm into an unstoppable machine. Jimi Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar. George Clinton somehow managed to take pieces from […]  ( 62 min )

The 2026 season flies in the face of the owners claim that MLB needs a salary cap to stay competitive. There is one team a bit above .600, and three teams just below .400. For the first time in a while, there is no truly terrible team. Here’s the Baseball Musings Season Simulator running a […]  ( 26 min )

Every Monday Baseball Musings compares offense of the current season to the previous season through the same number of full weeks. Through 15 weeks in 2026, MLB games produced 9.03 runs per game compared to 8.75 runs per game in 2025. The quarter run increase puts MLB games on the sweet spot of 9.0 runs […]  ( 26 min )

Welcome new subscribers!

Devon is the very capable Executive Director of the Maine Democratic Party, and is helping lead Maine Dems through this critical process of picking a new Senate nominee

Our community hit a big milestone this weekend - we've now raised $4m for battleground candidates and state parties this cycle! Great work all.......

Say you go jump to a header in org-mode somewhere with C-c C-o. Did you know that you can go back with C-c &? And that it has history, so you can keep going back?? Years of isearch-backwards… wasted. Mind blown. 🤯  ( 2 min )

Bozhidar Batsov, Marcin Borkowski). Also, quite a few people have signed up for the Human Emacs initiative. Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/315050696/ Tue Jul 14 1800 Europe/London Emacs Berlin: In-Person-Only Emacs-Berlin Stammtisch https://emacs-berlin.org/ Tue Jul 14 1900 Europe/Berlin M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Jul 15 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore OrgDevMeetup https://bbb.emacsverse.org/rooms/orgdevmeetup Sat Jul 18 0100 America/Vancouver - 0300 America/Chicago - 0400 America/Toronto - 0800 Etc/UTC - 1000 Europe/Berlin - 1330 Asia/Kolkata - 16…  ( 3 min )

As I mentioned yesterday, I started organizing (and cleaning) my Emacs config. What may have seemed like an annoying and boring task has proven to be fun and addicting (reminds me of this, which is part of this video 😂). I’ve already discovered a couple of new improvements to my current config as I was researching individual settings and why I have them, and as I said I do plan to share it. For now though, one important section I added to my config is a quick org-mode links reference. This is actually the first time I figured out the difference between radio links and “regular” plain links and how to use them. Here it is, slightly modified: Org-ID We know about links to other files using org-id: You give a header an :ID: property (this is generated automatically1 when you link to a header…  ( 3 min )

I’ve been using flyspell-mode for the better part of two decades, and I’ve written about it a couple of times before. It gets the job done, but it has always felt a bit creaky to me - it checks words one at a time as you type, flyspell-buffer is painfully slow in big buffers, and you have to remember to enable flyspell-prog-mode in your programming modes, so it would check only comments and strings there. Recently, as part of the ongoing overhaul of my personal Emacs config, I finally replaced it with jinx and I can already tell you that I’m not going back. Why Jinx? Jinx is a modern spell-checker by Daniel Mendler (of vertico, consult and corfu fame), built on top of libenchant.1 Quite a few things make it a great alternative to Flyspell: It’s fast. Jinx checks only the visible part of th…  ( 3 min )

Royals Draft Gets Mixed Reviews @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: 102…  ( 13 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}.row-2 .column-1 .block-7 .button:hover{background-color:#16688b!important;border-bottom:0 solid transparent!important;border-left:0 solid transparent!important;border-right:0 solid transparent!important;border-top:0 solid transparent!important;color:#fff!important} @media (max-width:660px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:non…  ( 2 min )

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

Who’s Up For A Little Sports Adventure?96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inher…  ( 7 min )

Nice try though, Mr. President.  ( 74 min )

In the wake of two recent shootings, I’m worried that we’ll never rid ourselves of these murderous goons.  ( 75 min )

He was the best thing about The Hunt For Red October, and I forgave him a long time ago for playing the grown-up Damien in The Final Conflict.  ( 71 min )

Oh, and he’s taxing all shipped cargo too? Open indeed.  ( 71 min )

If that’s not indicative of the modern Republican Party, I don’t know what is.  ( 77 min )

To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way. I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely have children ... someday. But I was too transient and my career always took priority, so I just put off the decision. I crossed into my 30s and started to stare down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and knew that even though I still felt like a teenager who is woefully unprepared to be a parent, it was time to make a decision. It still felt like I didn't have enough information. When I was booking guests for the new season of Try Hard, I asked Anna Sale, the creator and host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money, if she had any major transformational moments that she wanted to talk about, and I was thrilled when she suggested the moment she became a parent.  ( 16 min )

Listening to Jeff Peterson, president of basketball operations for the Charlotte Hornets, talk about the recent LeMelo Ball trade, you get a pretty good idea of what he thinks about last season's team. "There's no doubt in my mind that we had a successful season last year, by a lot of people's standards, and of course LaMelo was a huge part of that," said Peterson, from Las Vegas, upon the formal completion of a deal announced nearly two weeks ago. Eager to sing the praises of the incoming Naz Reid, Peterson was also about as clear as decency could permit about what he seems to think of as the realistic limits of a Ball-led team. "These decisions are challenging, at times, but when you look at the totality of the season, and everything, of where we were, it's important to take an honest lo…  ( 27 min )

There are four players in MLB with a higher bWAR than Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler, but nobody can hope to top him in PAR (pettiness above replacement). Last week, after he was left off of the All-Star Game roster, Wheeler struck out 14 batters to tie his career-best performance. To make it very clear where his motivation came from, after the game he called the All-Star selection policies “BS.” Wheeler turned his doubters into his outers at the pitching mound of success, but he’s not done.  The league listened to Zack Wheeler’s comments, and Zack Wheeler listened to me (as everyone should always). He made enough of a splash with his near-expletives and his reminders sent to the people who need reminding that on Friday the league offered him a spot on the All-Star Game roster. They may have thought that this would put the whole ordeal to bed. But that just shows how little the league understands true greatness.  Zack Wheeler knows his worth. He is an artist with the brush of spite in his hand. He cannot be placated with such disrespectful participation trophies. He will accept nothing less than greatness. Would Michaelangelo be satisfied with painting only The Creation of Adam and not the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Imagine if Andy Warhol stopped at only one Marilyn. How different might the world be if Shakespeare never expanded past historical plays into the field of tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth. Naturally, Wheeler declined the invitation. He explained to reporters on Saturday, “They disrespected me, so I’m not going to participate.” He added that he didn’t want anyone to throw him a “pity party,” but that’s likely because he’s already been busy for the past week planning himself a petty party.  ( 16 min )

Bryce Harper has finally provided an answer to the question of how he ended up helping FanDuel convince a problem gambler to lose more money. You may not be surprised to learn that Harper got himself into this sticky situation partly due to an inability to assign meaning to words. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a FanDuel bettor and gambling addict named Terry Thompson received a personalized video message from Harper that was sent to him by his FanDuel VIP manager, Bryttanni Morgan. The video featured Harper wishing Thompson and his family a happy Thanksgiving, and had the FanDuel logo superimposed on it. Harper released a statement on his Instagram account today saying that he did not record the video in direct partnership with FanDuel, but to fulfill an order made by Morgan through his Cameo account. Harper said that Morgan did not place her order through the business video requests submission form provided by Cameo, and so therefore he could not have known that FanDuel would use it as a branded video message for one of its customers. "I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it," Harper said in his statement.  ( 15 min )

Conor McGregor came up lame literally one second into Saturday’s comeback bout with Max Holloway. To open a fight that the UFC claimed drew the biggest live gate in mixed martial arts history, McGregor rushed out of his corner and threw a flying kick with his left leg. The kick fell short of Holloway’s head by at least a foot, and then McGregor had a landing worthy of the "agony of defeat” guy, dropping to the cage floor in a heap without being touched. Then McGregor immediately got up and went at Holloway again with another left-leg kick that missed badly, and again fell down at the speed of gravity. In his first fight in five years, McGregor had knocked himself down twice in five seconds.    Holloway threw a few punches at his supine opponent, but clearly sensed something was off. He backed away and let McGregor rise. And McGregor quickly fell down again. Everybody watching the bizarre spectacle, including Holloway and referee Mike Beltran, seemed puzzled about how to handle these unforeseen and shocking events.  ( 20 min )

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE OF FRANCE — They call it the diagonal of the void: the corridor running southwest to northeast across France where population density is significantly lower than elsewhere in the country. Explanations vary as to why, though after spending three nights in the void, I can confirm it feels empty here. Perhaps the spookiest sight was something I saw on the side of the road as we drove from Perigueux to Bergerac, on the side of a road in a village so quiet it may as well have been abandoned: what I believe to be a ham truck (pictured above). Scholars of the original text will recall the entirety of Dave McKenna's oracular sermon about ham trucks, but I am happy to bring newcomers and on-initiates into the fold. In our internal Slack, Dave insisted there were "ham trucks all over the roadsides" in the south of France; the hams were rotisseried, and often accompanied by "little ass potatoes." Nobody else had seen such a sight, many were skeptical of McKenna's claims, and his wife could not produce, when requested under oath, evidence of "any ham on the net." McKenna urged the Defector staff to "do the math"; Brandy Jensen asked a friend who lived in Marseille, who said it was possible; Dave McKenna responded, "lotta heroin in marseille"; we had a lot of laughs, and found no answers. I believe the vehicle I found in the diagonal of the void is a ham truck, the sort Dave described. The decorative castle outlining the truck suggests the meats cooked on its inner rotisserie are sold in some sort of festival-style gathering, or as part of a themed dining establishment of some kind. I think it's important to clarify that the rotisserie tongs on the apparatus are robust, the sort that could easily handle something larger than a chicken. Perhaps a pig.  ( 16 min )

You have one last job to do this Monday morning. This week's puzzle was constructed by Madison Shultz, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Madison has too many hobbies. She spends most of her free time skiing, climbing, hiking, and rockhounding, but started constructing crosswords in 2025 as a creative outlet and reason to stay inside more with her two cats. If you like this puzzle, you can find more of her work at her blog Crossword Curiosities. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003 Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48. Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and …  ( 22 min )

After losing the 2025 Australian Open final, Sascha Zverev was remarkably despondent. The man who defeated him, Jannik Sinner, put both hands on Zverev's shoulders and delivered a pep talk to the sobbing runner-up as the duo awaited the presentation of their trophies. "I think Jannik is better than me at the moment. It's as simple as that," Zverev said in his post-match press conference. "I think I'm serving better than him, but that's it. He does everything else better than me. He moves better than me, he hits his forehand better than me, he hits his backhand better than me, he returns better than me, he volleys better than me." Many players suffer emotionally after losing a Slam final, and for Zverev it was his third time in that unpleasant scenario, but I couldn't remember the last ti…  ( 27 min )

Judge Williams: "[T]his was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President."

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

The Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority probably does not exist without Lindsey Graham, who would say and do anything for an attaboy tweet from the president. The post How Lindsey Graham Built the Trump Supreme Court appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

Twelve courts just shut down the regime’s data grab—and Trump’s own judge saved a gun ban

After losing in courts across the country, DOJ and the FTC have steered litigation over gender-affirming medical care for minors to a single Texas judge.

When Kristi Noem was pushed out of her job as the secretary of homeland security and replaced with Oklahoma’s GOP senator — and wannabe MMA fighter — Markwayne Mullin, the public was assured he would make all those pesky problems with Immigration and Customs Enforcement go away. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., described the concentration camp-style immigrant detention centers and the killings of two American citizens during immigration raids as “a little hiccup” and promised a “course correction” under Mullin. The New York Times heralded Mullin’s “warmer and fuzzier tone” during his confirmation hearing as a “sign that the administration wants to project a more moderated approach.” Various Republican leaders praised Mullin as a “good guy” who “likes dogs.” But savvy people weren’t foole…  ( 7 min )

The battle Sunday afternoon between Zack Wheeler of the Phillies and Tarik Skubal of the Tigers was good but short, resulting in a 5-0 Phillies win. Skubal lasted five innings, taking the loss as he allowed two runs and one walk with five strikeouts for a game score of 55. That was enough to put […]  ( 26 min )

Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs grabs the top slot of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings as teams go into the All-Star break. He singled and walked twice in a 8-4 win over the Cubs, raising his OBP to .386. His teammate, Alex Bregman, posted the highest game score of the day, a 74. He singled, […]  ( 26 min )

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We get a real treat as MLB heads into the All-Star break as the Phillies send Zack Wheeler against the Tigers and Tarik Skubal in Detroit. Since the start of the 2023 season, Skubal ranks first in ERA, Wheeler third. Both strike out over ten batters per game, neither walking many. Both do a decent […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.362, 0.759 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.342, 0.728 — Jung Hoo Lee batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.319, 0.699 — Casey Schmitt batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.311, 0.689 — Heliot Ramos batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.308, 0.720 — Ernie Clement batting […]  ( 27 min )

Junior Caminero of the Rays took over the top slot in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings, producing a double and two walks in a 6-1 win over the Mariners. His teammate, Jonathan Aranda ranks third after a three f four with two doubles. Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs dropped to second place, drawing two walks […]  ( 26 min )

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Thought my Emacs init file needs a bit of cleaning - it contains configs from maybe 5 and 6 years ago. It’s a nostalgic learning experience. More fun than I thought. More to come soon 🤓  ( 2 min )

nice post on the Jinx spell corrector. Mbork has tried fly-spell but found it too laggy for his purposes. That was back in the days when he had a Pentium class machine running at 100 Mhz so he thought, in view of his more modern hardware, that it was worth trying out fly-spell again. He still found it too slow and decided to try Jinx instead. I’ve always found fly-spell snappy and I hadn’t heard of Jinx until I read Prot’s post on writing (and spell correcting) foreign languages in Emacs but mbork wasn’t satisfied until he tried Jinx. He found that it was fast enough for his use cases and decided to embrace it as his spell corrector. He discovered that Jinx interfered with some of his work flows but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix those. You can check out mbork’s post for the details. If you are writing in multiple languages with Emacs, then Jinx may be an excellent solution as a spell checker. If, like me, you mostly write in your native tongue, you’ll probably find fly-spell is all you need. As I said above, it’s more than fast enough for me and provides a wonderfully interactive spell correction system.  ( 5 min )

The word Gantt tends to evoke project-management software with bars you can drag and a hefty license fee. The underlying idea, tasks arranged on a horizontal timeline, with owners and effort estimates, is much older and much simpler than the software around it. It is basically a chart. You can draw one with a pencil and a string for a plumb line. Org mode already stores everything you need for a Gantt chart: a hierarchy of tasks, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE timestamps, properties for Effort and assignments to various agents. What’s missing is the picture. But org can draw the picture too. Let’s take a look and, one hopes, save you a subscription fee. The minimum data model For each task you want to track on the chart, add three things: * Draft chapter 5 SCHEDULED: DEADLINE: <20…  ( 6 min )

#TIL that #Emacs also has a Global Mark Ring: the global mark ring records a sequence of buffers that you have been in, and, for each buffer, a place where you set the mark For programming buffers / projects, I've been using the xref stack to go back/forward when jumping around. But the global mark ring is super useful as a general purpose tracker of my context jumps. By default, C-x C- jumps back. There is no forward like xref-go-forward, but it' a ring so it's possible to go around. Or there's always consult-global-mark to show the marks in a list and select from it. Other helpful links: Emacs: Mark Ring by Arialdo Martini Efficiency With The Mark Ring by Vernon Grant  ( 1 min )

It was Sunday night in Los Angeles and streets of the city legendary for its traffic sat empty. Even Trader Joe's—the beloved grocery chain known as much for its tiny parking lots as its low prices—had plenty of spaces. For once, as the Clueless joke goes, you really could get anywhere in LA in 20 minutes. The reason? Mexico was playing England. In the World Cup. In the knockout rounds. In the vaunted home of El Tri, Estadio Azteca. Well before I arrived at my local soccer bar, an hour before kickoff, I had resigned myself to being among those who had to stand outside. As I positioned myself the best I could for a view of the TVs, just another person clad in the signature green, white, and red of El Tri, I announced to no one in particular, "Oh thank God, the television is on Telemundo." I have been far from alone in this sentiment. For the Mexico match, Variety reported that 21.7 million people watched on Fox—while and even larger 23.2 million watched on Telemundo. More than half of the total audience watched the broadcast in Spanish.  ( 27 min )

The master plan is clear to anyone with eyes. FIFA rigged the World Cup draw so Argentina would become the first team to make the semis without playing a side ranked in the top 15. FIFA has rigged every match in favor of Argentina. FIFA demanded that the VAR take away Egypt's second goal over a much-delayed foul call. In that same match, FIFA instructed the referees to not call a foul by Argentina's Julián Alvarez on Mohammed Salah. FIFA even put an all-Argentine referee crew on the France-Morocco match. And, during Saturday night's quarter-final against Switzerland, FIFA pulled out the big guns, rigging the game in Argentina's favor by forcing Breel Embolo to commit the single stupidest dive I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ttdGtk8eGI  ( 27 min )

For all of its defensive solidity and possession dominance, Spain has been missing a finishing touch in this World Cup. It hurt the Spaniards in the opening match, the stunning draw to Cape Verde. It made them struggle against Uruguay in an ugly game on the final day of the group stage. The 3-0 romp against over-matched Austria felt like a turning point, but then the dreadful viewing on display in the team's 1-0 victory in the round of 16 over Portugal felt like a regression to the mean. Friday's quarterfinal against a hobbled Belgium was more of the same: A lot of possession, some decent chances, and little to show for it. Then, just as he did in the dying embers of the Portugal match, Mikel Merino showed up and scored Spain into the next round. Not bad for a player who was, for most of his career, nominally a defensive midfielder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRiB7fpsl8Q  ( 23 min )

BERGERAC, France — The 2026 Tour de France is thus far mostly bereft of big narratives and interesting surprises. The race for the first two podium places seems mostly over. There is no off-bike story that's captivated the race or raised larger-order implications like the saga of Ineos soigneur David Rozman's doping connections. Torstein Træn delighted the race and threatened to upend the back half of the top-10 fight, only to crack on the Tourmalet before falling on the descent and breaking a quartet of his ribs. However, there is still one major piece of intrigue. What the hell is going on with the public spat between the two biggest stars at Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe? The drama kicked off after Stage 6, in which Tadej Pogacar smashed the Tourmalet climbing and descending records en route to a dominant solo stage win and the likely permanent seizure of the yellow jersey. Behind him, Jonas Vingegaard rode in solo for second, and a six-rider pack of contenders for the final podium spot sprinted it out. The finishing sextet featured two pairs of teammates, the stronger of which is Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz, who finished fourth and sixth on the day, respectively. They came into the Tour as co-leaders, a bad idea in general and a particularly nonsensical one for this pair.  ( 29 min )

Morning all.

California delivered for children, the GOP got caught faking votes, and Trump couldn’t fly his own gifted plane

Hear from the lawyers who argued before the Supreme Court this term 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 )

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

Esmerlyn Valdez of the Pirates swung his magic wand on Saturday and delivered three home runs in a doubleheader sweep of the Brewers. That gives him ten home runs in 100 MLB plate appearances in his first season. He owns a .311/.370/.722 slash line with 16 of his 28 hits going for extra bases. He […]  ( 25 min )

The MLB amateur draft starts today, around 1 PM. MLB has tried to make it an event, and I am sure there are plenty of interested fans . Unlike football and basketball, however, baseball amateurs tend not to have reached stardom. So that draw isn’t there. Still, it’s another opportunity to see Rob Manfred booed […]  ( 25 min )

The Mariners try to stop their slide as they send Logan Gilbert against the Rays and Griffin Jax. Gilbert seems like he should own a better career ERA than 3.53. His strikeout rate is good, his walk rate is great, and his home run rate is okay. He limits hits. He simply pitches worse with […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.380, 0.770 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.363, 0.745 — Jung Hoo Lee batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.338, 0.714 — Casey Schmitt batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.329, 0.704 — Heliot Ramos batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.308, 0.708 — Michael Harris II […]  ( 26 min )

Tristan Peters of the White Sox posted the highest game score of the day on Friday, an 87. He hit for the cycle in an unusual way: Per Elias, Peters became the third player in at least the expansion era (since 1961) to complete the cycle by getting two hits in the same inning, joining […]  ( 26 min )

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These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics. If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I would consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes. Package name (GNU ELPA): doric-themes Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes Backronym: Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively … themes. Below are the release notes. Version 1.2.0 on 2026-07-12 Two new themes doric-tiger is a light theme, while doric-lion is dark. Both have warm colours. Org agenda events are easier to spot Events are entries which have an active timestamp but not a SCHEDULED or DEADLINE keyword associated with it. Those are now rendered in italics in addition to the faint foreground they already had (the faint foreground is there because an event is not as important as a Support for vc-dir-key-binding-hint-label (Emacs 32) This concerns a new option for VC Dir buffers to display their available key bindings. The face applies to the additional headings. They should now look like all the other headings in those buffers in the interest of stylistic consistency. Some package.el faces stand out more Those are present in the buffer that M-x list-packages produces. They concern certain status indicators and fit in better with the rest of the design. The nobreak-space face is now underlined This is one way to make that character visible. It is useful to know that a space is not the regular space. For example, in French orthography we are expected to include non-breaking spaces between the quotes and the words like « Protesilaos ». Whether you actually follow that guideline is another discussion—I happily ignore it.  ( 1 min )

a bit of trickery you can extend the ranges to 0–9 and A–Z. I never use priorities but Raymond Zeitler does and after figuring out the above trickery he thought it would be useful to have an ultimate priority a sort of “drop everything and do this immediately” priority. He decided to make this priority 100 times the highest priority and to designate it with !. The solution wasn’t straightforward but it wasn’t too difficult either. The thing about Emacs is that it’s easy to check the source code to see how things are done. It turns out that Org has a org-priority-get-priority-function variable that contains a function that Org calls to get the priority from the priority cookie. Zeitler wrote his own version to check for a ! and return the high priority if it’s found. If not, then it calls a slightly modified version of the normal function. As I say, I don’t make use of the priority mechanism and have no idea how many people do but if you’re one of them and are looking for a way to specify an extraordinary priority, take a look at Zeitler’s post. You can cut and paste his code if you’re interested.  ( 5 min )

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

Emacs has had a spell-checker for a very long time. In fact, I’ve been using ispell-word for at least several years now, as I have mentioned for example here. However, I’ve only used Flyspell mode once, over two decades ago, when I tried it out on a machine with maybe 8MB RAM and a Pentium-class processor clocked at about 100MHz and decided that it’s too slow to be really useful. Well, things have changed a bit since then, haven’t they?  ( 3 min )

So a while back I was moving servers and in the process I managed to screw up the databases for one of the sites to where it was not recoverable.  I didn’t have the time or energy to redo things, so I just said screw it and left it by the wayside. Yesterday I was...  ( 7 min )

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

96 SCOTUS’s shadow docket is eroding the public’s waning trust in the courts 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…  ( 6 min )

Conspiracy Theories Around Lawmakers’ Health Are Going to Keep Spiraling#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 { borde…  ( 13 min )

96 Don’t Miss It: We’re Fighting Back Against Trump’s Efforts to Avoid the Presidential Records Act 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:inh…  ( 6 min )

Trump just fired the agency that runs 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 …  ( 4 min )

The Senate is considering the nominations of Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton this week - Democrats must do everything we can to block them.....

The Royals have signed Vince Velasquez to a minors contract and assigned the veteran righty to Triple-A Omaha, as per Velasquez’s MLB.com profile page.  Velasquez elected free agency on June 30 rather than accept an outright assignment to the Cubs’ Triple-A squad. The right-hander signed a minor league deal with Chicago in February, and the […]  ( 6 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…  ( 3 min )

The most important election stories happen before Election Day 🗳️96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !…  ( 5 min )

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

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

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

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

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 )

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 )

I love President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. I love its emptiness. Its expensive food. Its ability to confound Trump-friendly media outlets that keep pretending it’s going great. This spectacle on the National Mall in Washington, DC, part of Trump’s Trump-centric celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, is like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends. It’s a daily humiliation for a wildly unpopular president who coopted what should be a unifying national celebration and turned it into repellent schlock. And I love it so much it hurts. Trump's Great American State Fair humiliation is soothing America I love seeing Fox News broadcasting from the fair, its hosts claiming the place is filled with excited patriots while the scenes behind them show a va…  ( 14 min )

8 wins that ruined the regime’s week—and Trump felt every one

One of the most intriguing players heading into the trade deadline made his long-awaited return to the lineup on Friday. Catcher Ryan Jeffers was back behind the plate for the Twins after missing nearly two months with a fractured hamate bone. The backstop needed just five rehab games to get up to speed. Jeffers will […]  ( 7 min )

The Marlins broadcasters just explained an interesting strategy the Marlins deploy when they have a man on third and a left-handed batter at the plate. The runner in that situation takes a lead in fair territory. Normally, that is frowned upon because if a batted ball hits that runner, the runner is out. The Marlins […]  ( 25 min )

Shohei Ohtani will not start Friday night due to knee inflammation on his left side. The injury will also keep him out of the All-Star Game. At this point, we don’t know how long he will be out of the Dodgers lineup.  ( 25 min )

Two teams fighting for division titles meet in Miami as the Guardians send Parker Messick against Sandy Alcantara. Messick, with his 2.80 ERA and his outstanding three-true outcomes is making a nice bid for AL Rookie of the Year. He currently rates a 3.2 rWAR for the season. Alcantara owns a 10-4 record with a […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.386, 0.772 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Tanner Gordon. 0.372, 0.751 — Jung Hoo Lee batting vs. Tanner Gordon. 0.345, 0.718 — Casey Schmitt batting vs. Tanner Gordon. 0.342, 0.715 — Heliot Ramos batting vs. Tanner Gordon. 0.317, 0.683 — Victor Bericoto batting […]  ( 27 min )

Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs stayed atop the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings as he doubled and walked in a 3-2 Orioles win, pushing his OBP up to .387. Otto Lopez of the Marlins moved into second place with a triple and two walks in an 8-4 win over the Mariners, the Marlins sweeping their fellow […]  ( 26 min )

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Trump's dangerous new bid to seize control of 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 …

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…  ( 2 min )

96 For the (Presidential) Record 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!im…  ( 6 min )

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

The problem My email setup is the usual text based machinery I keep writing about: Mu4e with mu, isync (mbsync) and msmtp. It works beautifully – until one day it did not. When I moved emails around in Emacs – with mu4e-headers-mark-for-move, mu4e-headers-mark-for-refile or other command – the date of the moved email changed. A mail from last March would suddenly float to the top of the mailbox as if it had just arrived. The diagnosis The Date: header inside the message is never touched – that is why Mu4e always looks correct, it shows the date parsed from that header. What changes is the arrival date: the IMAP “internal date” the server stores separately from the body. That is what Mail.app shows and sorts by (“Date Received”). The culprit is this setting, which I need to avoid duplicate-…  ( 3 min )

1 I was disappointed to learn that valid priority characters are limited to 0–9 and A–Z. I thought it would be neat if the exclamation mark ("!") could represent the ultimate priority, a sort of "drop everything and do this immediately" kind of priority. It turns out that you can use "!" for this purpose, regardless of which priority characters you've configured. The trick is to write a function and assign it to org-priority-get-priority-function. The function (which I named org-get-cust-priority) simply looks for "!" in the priority cookie and returns one hundred times the value that would be returned by the highest valid priority. If it doesn't find "!" it simply calls a modified version of the usual org-get-property function,2 which I named org-get-std-priority. The two functi…  ( 10 min )

1. TLDR   tldr Two technologies have endowed every editor with IDE superpowers this past decade: tree-sitter, a generic incremental parser that gives your editor a live syntax tree of your code, and the Language Server Protocol (LSP), a generic client-server protocol that gives your editor code intelligence features like linting, type-checking, auto-completion, and code navigation. Each one replaces an M×N fan-out of per-language, per-editor hacks with a single, language- and editor-agnostic protocol. Emacs has merged support for both into its core, and shipped them in Emacs 29.1 (three years ago this month!). This post explains what each one does, visualizes a real-life tree-sitter parse tree, and recounts how both technologies made their way upstream into the glorious Emacs core.…  ( 28 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:5  ( 2 min )

A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level. The diagram below suggests a truer picture of how Emacs’ relates to an OS and its capabilities. Emacs’ built-in access to OS system services (file system, network, etc.) coupled with the ability to run other programs makes it routine to improvise client behavior within it. Because of this, Emacs users are able to accomplish many of their computing needs from the different client modes that have been made for it. This gives credence to the notion of “living only in Emacs.” In this post, we’ll examine some of the ways Emacs lets you build a client. By the end of this post, you’ll hopefully be con…  ( 4 min )

It's been a while since I wrote for the Emacs Blog Carnival but I have missed it. I decided to dip my toes back in when I saw July 2026's theme - Programming. I started thinking about how my Emacs configuration for development isn't that special and then I realized that the centerpiece of my environment, direnv and Nix, is something that is worth talking about. I have a whole post on setting them up so this will continue with what that post glossed over: How does this work with Emacs? The idea started off with the fact that I don't want separate configurations for my CLI and Emacs. I want to just configure it once and things will just work in both. Since getting my shell to see my Emacs configuration seems like a waste of time, I chose to let Emacs read what the shell was doing. What I end…

Let's keep rallying for the Maine Democrats today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's keep rallying for the Maine Dems everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A leaked group chat shows what’s been bubbling not so far beneath the surface of the wing-nut Right. Let’s pray it doesn’t boil over.  ( 119 min )

Is Plato’s Republic too gay?   This is one of many brave questions posed by the Texas Tech University System’s chancellor and Board of Regents as they implement an “extraordinary system of censorship in higher education,” according to a new lawsuit filed Wednesday in Texas federal court by faculty unions. The American Association of University Professors and the Texas AAUP-AFT said that Texas Tech is violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments by way of sweeping new restrictions on academic freedom.    The Texas Tech University System collectively serves about 64,000 students, and is one of only nine in the country offering programs that span undergraduate, medical, law, nursing, pharmacy, dental, and veterinary education. That’s a lot of curricula to rid of "content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex," "endorsement of a gender spectrum," and suggestions that "meritocracy or a strong work ethic are inherently racist"! Thankfully, university system Chancellor Brandon Creighton said Texas Tech built an AI tool to scan syllabi, reading materials, and lesson plans for censor-worthy material.  ( 19 min )

Cheri Kempf knows exactly how hard it is to sustain a professional women’s sports league. She was the commissioner of the now-defunct National Pro Fastpitch league. During her tenure, the NPF’s league office had two full-time employees, one of whom was Kempf. It launched in 2004 and went through rounds of expansion and contraction, but didn’t have the television contracts or budget to sustain itself long term. When the COVID-19 pandemic came and canceled the 2020 and 2021 seasons, the league folded. It was around this time that she received a call from Jon Patricof, the co-founder and CEO of Athletes Unlimited, an organization founded in 2020 that has been attempting to establish pro women’s leagues across various sports. Patricof reached out to Kempf for her expertise, and right away she could tell that Athletes Unlimited had advantages that the NPF never did.    “That included it having the financial structure behind all of that as the foundation, so that is something that professional softball in this country has never seen, certainly to that degree,” said Kempf, who is now the AUSL’s chief broadcast officer and executive producer. “The NPF really was just a fraction of any of that, in terms of budget and league office and enablement.”  ( 28 min )

Norway's charmed and charming run to the World Cup quarterfinals has been a good time all around. Erling Haaland is probably the most lovingly memed man on Earth at the moment, and with good reason. The Norwegians are getting really into cowboy fashion. It's all very fun. They seem like a fun hang. And they are rowing. They are rowing after wins. They are rowing in Times Square. They are rowing up the escalator. The Viking Row is the breakout celebration of this Cup, with supporters joining the team after victories in a metronomic pantomime of their ancestors crossing the storm-toss'd seas, possibly to raid some abbey or other. But after Norway's victory over Senegal in the group stage, a photo went viral showing one lone Norway fan refusing to put his back into the oar. Emil Anners Lappen refuses to row! He simply will not. In the silly season of World Cup human interest stories, this has made Emil famous. The news is covering him in his home country. They're covering him in Sweden. And now, ahead of England's final-eight match against Norway, Emil has finally been interviewed in English, by Sky News. https://twitter.com/skynews/status/2075338675114684690  ( 21 min )

GAVARNIE-GÉDRE, France — Millions of people travel to the Tour de France every year, almost all of them on purpose. This is the story of three people who did so by accident. While waiting for the riders to make their way up to Gavarnie-Gédre for the finish of Stage 6, I took a little stroll out to see the Cirque du Gavarnie. The beautiful glacial amphitheater houses the tallest waterfall in mainland France, and the final climb of Thursday's racing made up for its unselective profile by at least finishing in an incredible atmosphere. After taking a little cool-off dip in a crisp stream made pearlescent by eroded minerals, I spotted three people who definitely didn't belong. Antonio, Teresana, and Federico were decked out in backpacking gear, talking to a local official, and displaying the universal body language of people who have found themselves in a Bit Of A Situation. I knew I had to talk to these guys. They seemed fun, and like they had a story. Both turned out to be correct.  ( 24 min )

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have a balcony makeover, thoughts on washable rugs, and a plea to please, please not use contact paper on your countertops! Jessica asks: By NYC standards my balcony is HUGE (11' x 5') but I can't seem to make the layout quite work. The two most important things to me are being able to lounge comfortably, and also have a table/chairs for two.  I have a small couch with ottomans and also a gravity chair. Neither are super comfortable to be honest. I like being able to easily move the couch around—at one point I had it against the door instead of under the window—but it's not quite big enough all around to really relax in. The gravity chair is pretty swagless, which I wouldn't mind except it's also not as comfortable as it looked on the website.  I also end up with a lot of dead space in the middle (currently filled by the gravity chair, but I'm thinking of getting rid of the whole setup). Is there an obvious seating arrangement that I'm missing? Should I consider two lounge chairs instead of the couch? The door next to the couch isn't used—the actual entrance is the sliding glass door next to the table.  ( 23 min )

In September 2025 the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the Los Angeles Clippers for potential salary cap circumvention after Pablo Torre Finds Out reported that the team had arranged a no-show endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a fraudulent tree-planting company called Aspiration. On June 30, 2026, the Clippers agreed to trade Leonard to the Toronto Raptors. That trade is now on hold because, somehow, the aforementioned investigation is still ongoing. On Thursday both the Clippers and Raptors released statements saying their trade is being put on pause. The Raptors' statement said that the reason for the delay is that the NBA informed them that they would "assume the risk of any potential outcome of the investigation impacting Kawhi." This is an int…  ( 17 min )

World Cups are rarely wire-to-wire coronations. In fact, the competition is so fierce, and the margins so small, that usually there isn't a single clear "best" team that goes ahead and wins it all. In 2010, you could argue that Germany looked stronger than eventual champions Spain up until the Spaniards pulled off a narrow 1-0 win against them in the semifinal. The Dutch were probably the strongest team overall in 2014, even though they fell to Argentina in the semis. As the legendary final itself demonstrated, there wasn't terribly much separating France from Argentina in 2022 either. Really, of the most recent four tournaments, only France in 2018 looked like the best team throughout the competition and then confirmed that sense by winning. It's no surprise, then, that the French appear to be on the verge of pulling off that same feat again, coming off a 2-0 domination of Morocco in Thursday's quarterfinal that once again had Les Bleus seeming unstoppable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mx7L_IgBfY This has been, more than anything, a World Cup of stars. Lionel Messi has been astonishing for Argentina, Erling Haaland has Norway one game from the semis on the sheer power of his goalscoring, and Harry Kane stands in Norway's path as England's best player (and, if it's not him, it's Jude Bellingham, another star playing up to his maximum level). France's strength is that it is the only team that can boast a roster for full of stars, one in which no one player is needed to win. Of course, France does that have a leading star in Kylian Mbappé, but it also has Michael Olise, and Ousmane Dembélé, and Désiré Doué, and William Saliba, and Dayot Upamecano, and Bradley Barcola off the bench. Not all of those players are, by definition, stars, but they are all so talented that it's impossible to focus on one player in order to shut down France.  ( 23 min )

The Trump White House joins the gun activists petitioning the Supreme Court to continue its rewrite of the Second Amendment. The post The Supreme Court Is Coming For Assault Weapons Bans Next appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Plus: Planned Parenthood's clinics outlasted the regime’s Medicaid ban

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}.row-2 .column-1 .block-7 .button:hover{background-color:#16688b!important;border-bottom:0 solid transparent!important;border-left:0 solid transparent!important;border-right:0 solid transparent!important;border-top:0 solid transparent!important;color:#fff!important} @media (max-width:660px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:non…

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

Creationism hasn’t generated much coverage in the mainstream media over the past decade. The days when fundamentalists challenged scientists to “debates” over evolution now seem quaint in the era of Donald Trump, whose belief is that you never need to persuade when beating your opponents into submission is an option. Under the president’s leadership, the right has shifted from arguing about dinosaur bones and carbon dating to making more blunt demands for book bans and even stripping women of the right to vote. This is not to say that evangelicals’ attachment to creationism has gone away, even if it has faded from mainstream discourse. This week, one of the most elaborate and ridiculous bits of Christian right propaganda, Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Reade…  ( 7 min )

More Than Just Smooth Music Mention the phrase “yacht rock” today, and most people immediately think of silky harmonies, immaculate studio production, jazzy chord changes, and songs that sound perfect for cruising along the California coast with the windows down. Artists like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, Boz Scaggs, Toto, and the Doobie Brothers […]  ( 24 min )

Olivia Rodrigo has built her career on an extraordinary ability to turn deeply personal emotions into songs that feel universally relatable. From the heartbreak and insecurity of SOUR to the sharper wit, confidence, and emotional complexity of GUTS, she has consistently demonstrated that she is far more than another pop star chasing chart success. She […]  ( 8 min )

Gainesville Beginnings Long before Tom Petty became one of America’s most beloved rock musicians, he was simply a quiet kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida, with a head full of dreams and a radio that rarely seemed to leave his side. While many future rock stars emerged from New York, Los Angeles, or London, Petty’s […]  ( 43 min )

Few albums have altered the course of popular music as profoundly as Pet Sounds. Released by the Beach Boys in May 1966, it arrived at a moment when rock and pop were rapidly evolving from simple entertainment into serious artistic expression. While the Beach Boys had already established themselves as America’s premier surf-pop group with […]  ( 8 min )

The Grateful Dead: The Complete History of America’s Greatest Live Band There has never been another band quite like the Grateful Dead. They sold millions of records, toured almost constantly for three decades, inspired one of the most devoted fan communities in music history, and created a culture that became every bit as significant as […]  ( 44 min )

Some albums entertain. Some become commercial successes. A rare few fundamentally change what popular music is capable of accomplishing. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released in 1971, belongs firmly in that last category. More than fifty years after its release, it remains one of the most celebrated, influential, and emotionally resonant records ever made. It […]  ( 8 min )

The Royals have been one of the more disappointing teams in MLB. They’re alongside the Angels as the two worst teams in the American League, the only AL clubs completely buried in the playoff picture. That theoretically positions them as deadline sellers. However, as explored on the MLBTR podcast this week, Kansas City doesn’t have […]  ( 10 min )

Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act96 :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-dec…  ( 5 min )

Royals Pre-Draft Ramblings @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) …  ( 14 min )

96 Is this a picture of a good pitcher? @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 )

Kakoune introduction explains that vim uses verb first, noun second for its commands, whereas Kakoune uses noun first, verb second. I wrote a blog post about why I prefer noun-verb over verb-noun, not only in text editors but also in games and other applications. I started cobbling together some commands in a hydra, trying to match vim keys when I could: (defhydra hydra-mark (:body-pre (set-mark-command nil) :color red) " _w_, _,w_: word, symbol _i'_, _a'_: string _i)_, _a)_: pair _t_, _f_: to char (exclude/include) _0_, _$_: begin/end of line _;_: comment _u_: url _e_: email _>_: web-mode block or tag _S_: sexp _d_: defun _p_: paragraph _s_: sentence _h_, _j_, _k_, _l_: move _H-._: off " ("t" mark-to-char-exclusive) ("f" mark-to-char-inclusive) (…  ( 5 min )

1 If you specify priorities from 65 to 90, Org will interpret the numbers as ordinal values of ASCII character and give you "A" to "Z." If you try to be clever and specify priorities as 65 to 91 (91 is the decimal ASCII code for left square bracket) you'll be disappointed that when you lower the priority from "Z," you don't get "[." (I was disappointed, anyway.) You can define priorities from 10 to 99, for example. But if you try to get to a priority higher than 10 using org-priority-up, Org will clear the priority cookie. However, you can manually enter a priority of 0 to ensure the item appears above all other items. (Please see Figure 1, below.) Thus, a priority value of 0 can be your "stat" item. It would be super neat if Org could understand that ASCII characters below 0 (such as exclamation mark) are an even higher priority than 0. Unfortunately, it doesn't even recognize [#!] as a priority cookie. forty times. If you think you can invoke M-4 0 M-x org-priority-up to go quickly from 50 to 10, you'll be disappointed (again). The function org-priority-up doesn't accept a prefix argument.2 How do you use priority in Org? 1 Org Manual -- Priorities 2 But you can record a macro that consists of a single S- key press and then play it back with a prefix argument of 39.  ( 10 min )

how to globally set a key binding so that it won’t be overridden. He uses setting Meta+o to other-window as an example to explore the problem. Prot begins by defining Meta+o in the global map in the usual way: (define-key global-map (kbd "M-o") 'other-window ) Meta+o turns out to be a prefix key for inserting an HTML face command. The problem is that Emacs will use the most specific bindings first. Global bindings are the most general, followed by major mode bindings, and ending with minor mode bindings as the most specific. Since HTML is a major mode, its keybinding take precedence over the global binding that we set. The answer is to get more specific yet by defining our binding in a minor mode so that it will always have precedence. Prot shows how to define a minor where we can define our binding and activate it globally so that it’s always available. Of course, once we have this mechanism set up, we can add any number of bindings to our minor mode. Prot demonstrates this by adding a binding that Org uses. Take a look at Prot’s video for all the details. He’s also included a copy of the file he was working with so you can see everything without worrying about copying it down from the video. The video is 12 minutes, 45 seconds so it should be easy to fit in.  ( 5 min )

Lots to talk about this week!

We have one job now - the general election is here and we need remain focused on helping our battleground House and Senate candidates win

Watch: Why Democrats need to fight harder 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 …

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}.row-1 .column-1 .block-2.text_block td.pad{padding:30px 10px 10px 10px!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-4.text_block td.pad{padding:15px 10px 10px 10px…  ( 2 min )

FBI Demands Backup As It Tries to Substantiate Trump’s 2020 Delusions#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:n…  ( 10 min )

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

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

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 )

Judge James Boasberg heard arguments on Thursday afternoon in D.C.

Every time someone like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is killed by one of the president’s amped-up goons, I lose my faith in our country all over again.  ( 106 min )

Republicans are really into strange disappearances lately.  ( 106 min )

Some states have found a novel way to help anyone detained or harassed by these violent goons.  ( 117 min )

Agents shot a man dead in Houston, and go figure, the organization doesn’t have any evidence to back up its actions.  ( 105 min )

Nervy tennis is so rich. It can contain both the worst of the sport (in a technical sense) and the best of it (in a narrative sense). You can witness breakdowns in routine strokes, diseased shot selection, and facial expressions that indicate a horrible geyser of bile into the esophagus. But you'll also see the bravery of a player who is flagging, hurting, and still playing gorgeous tennis from a land beyond conscious thought. Rarely will there be tennis nervier than the third-set tiebreak that decided Thursday's Wimbledon semifinal between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova, and would have advanced either player into her first final at the tournament. The two women had traded the first two sets, each won with roughly equivalent ease, and danced cagily all the way to 6-6 in the third. Between points, Muchova clutched at her right side with a wince; in press afterward she diagnosed it as a stitch, said she "couldn't catch a breath," and was trying to massage it away. Despite coming out flat, Gauff elbowed her way back into the match with her usual stamina, opportunism, and guile; she looked fresher going into the deciding frame. They proceeded to play 22 points so entertaining, with career-defining chances earned and squandered by both players, that I had to run back the tiebreak as soon as it ended in Muchova's favor. Why not do it together? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpl9mApl2Tw  ( 30 min )

Terry Thompson is part of a lawsuit against FanDuel and DraftKings claiming that the sports books used their VIP services and products to intentionally prey on his gambling addiction. Thompson says he wagered $18.5 million with FanDuel and became addicted to gambling via the sports book's in-game micro bets. His suit claims he was also encouraged to continue gambling by a FanDuel VIP manager named Bryttanni Morgan, who at one point sent Thompson a personalized video from Bryce Harper. The 21-second video, obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer, features Harper speaking into his phone camera and wishing Thompson a happy Thanksgiving. "Your host Bryttanni, from FanDuel, wanted to make sure your Thanksgiving was extra special," Harper says in the video, which has a FanDuel logo superimposed over it. This was just one of many gifts Thompson said he received from Morgan, who communicated with him frequently via text message and shared details from her personal life. Morgan frequently provided Thompson with tickets to sporting events, including two Super Bowls.  ( 17 min )

PAU, France — Some people are natural performers. Torstein Træen is not, though his work on the bike might have been the last exciting general classification action before we get to Paris. As the 30-year-old Norwegian rider ascended the podium in Foix after Stage 4 to be wrapped in the yellow jersey, he grinned sheepishly and his Uno-X teammates gathered below to cheer him on. You wouldn't know he was bringing such a strange, interesting cycling career to an ecstatic new high. Træen looked shy, rocking back and forth like a character in an RPG loading screen and forgetting to take the ceremonial stuffed lion of victory until the podium attendant nudged him on the arm. At his official post-Tour press conference, at his other main interview, and at an interview after he crashed late in his first stage in the yellow jersey the next day (he's fine), the primary point Træen drove across was that he didn't really know what was going on. When a Japanese journalist looking for a very simple quote asked him about his extended family on the archipelago, Træen simply said, "I'm not really in contact with my Japanese family." Two days later, he was goofing around with the gendarmes and asking to hold one cop's gun. He is steady, laconic, the sort of rider I imagine Karl Ove Knausgaard would like (I emailed Knausgaard's representatives just in case). It didn't last, but it was beautiful.  ( 27 min )

I went to the Great American State Fair figuring it would make me feel lousy about my country. I don't remember being so right about anything.  I'd read all about how entertainers wouldn't take the stage, how states wouldn't staff the booths, and how nobody was showing up because the president had hijacked America's 250th birthday celebration and messed everything up. But with only a few days before this circus leaves town—the fair closes tomorrow—I wanted to see for myself if The Mess on the Mall could live down to its billing. And, sure, I wondered if Donald Trump's Stonehengian rendering of his proposed Arc de Failure looked as ridiculous in the flesh as online. (Yup and yup.) So I went. Turns out I was prepared for most of the awfulness. But not all the Jesus. So much Jesus. First, a summary of its pros and cons.  ( 32 min )

There was always an irony to Happy's name. The elephant's misfortune stamped her a celebrity. In their home in the wild, female Asian elephants roam for hundreds of miles and form lifelong attachments to a group of around seven relatives. In her home in the Bronx Zoo, Happy lived alone in a small exhibit. She had been separated for decades from the zoo's other two Asian elephants, Maxine and Patty, for her own protection. So Happy became famous for her loneliness, deprived of companionship, of family, of physical touch. But Happy was smart, too. She stored treats in her ear. She was the first elephant to pass the mirror self-recognition test, proving her self-awareness when she saw her reflection and poked with her trunk at a white X painted on her forehead. In 2018, the Nonhuman Rights Pr…  ( 32 min )

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — If you regret that you never got a chance to see the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, the losingest team in MLB history, can I interest you in a trip to Staten Island? No wait, come back. Just a few steps away from the ferry terminal, a morbidly curious fan can catch the independent Atlantic League's Staten Island FerryHawks, who have suffered through such a hapless year that they're legitimately challenging the Spiders' historic futility. With just over two months left in the season, the FerryHawks are saddled with an 11-57 record. Their pitchers carry a team ERA of 10.03. Their run differential is -389, which means they're losing their average game by 5.7 runs. Their best hitter, Joshua Palacios, is now on his way to the Pirates' Triple-A franchise. Yes, New York, it gets mo…  ( 20 min )

The Carolina Hurricanes are worthy NHL champs, plowing through the playoffs with a 16-3 record. It's a victory of commitment to an approach, as head coach Rod Brind'Amour's system finally paid ultimate dividends after seven years of postseason exits. It's a victory for bloggers everywhere, thanks to the employment of GM Eric Tulsky and analyst Tyler Dellow(!). But most important, it's a victory for family. The Dundon family, specifically. No other families. Notoriously cheap owner Tom Dundon is listed first on the Stanley Cup engraving every champion gets. It's his team, he can do what he wants, and at least the NHL is the last holdout in not handing its championship trophy to the owner first. Executives have had their names on the Cup since the Bruins did it in 1929. So it's fine that Tom Dundon is on there now. But whoever's job it was to do the engraving was certainly not done at one Dundon:  ( 19 min )

OK, now shit is about to get even realer. The FIFA World Cup sponsored by FIFA and presented by FIFA is now down to eight teams. If your favorite team isn’t among the last countries standing, that’s tough shit. You must pick a NEW favorite country, and you must do it right this instant or else suffer the consequences. [I draw my sword] But how can anyone pick just one team from France, Morocco, Belgium, Spain, Norway, England, Argentina, and Switzerland? Fear not amigo, because this week’s episode of The Distraction is here to help you do just that.  ( 16 min )

The Chicago Bears are one of the most storied franchises in the NFL. One of just two charter members of the league still playing today (the other being the Cardinals, a somewhat less-storied franchise), the Bears have had a lengthy and stalwart kinship with the City of Big Shoulders. That could change. Bears ownership announced on June 5 that they are focusing their attention on building a new stadium that not only isn’t in Chicago, but it isn’t in Illinois at all. “[T]he Chicago Bears Board of Directors met and voted to advance our stadium development project in Hammond, Indiana, with the exact site to be selected,” Chicago Bears Chairman George H. McCaskey and President and CEO Kevin Warren said in a statement. “We believe a world-class stadium project in Hammond will transform the region, connecting Northwest Indiana to the South Side of Chicago through the Loop and across neighborhoods and suburbs stretching north of the city. It will bring Chicagoland together and deliver new opportunities to its residents and businesses."  ( 41 min )

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

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 )

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

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

The conservative justices have spent years developing rules for campaign finance regulation that tilt in favor of billionaires every time. The post “End Citizens United” Is Meaningless Without Supreme Court Reform appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Plus: A Trump judge freed Florida’s professors, his World Cup call backfires, and Yale’s dean defied the regime

The Court's docket for its October 2026 Term doesn't yet have the kind of high-profile, Trump-related disputes that dominated OT2025. But they're coming.

The Brewers finish their series in St. Louis with Logan Henderson facing Andre Pallante. Henderson owns a 2.23 ERA in ten MLB starts. He struck out 63 batters in 48 1/3 innings with just 14 walks. Pallante owns ten wins as we approach the All-Star break, a single season career high for him. Never a […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.305, 0.704 — Brandon Marsh batting at Brady Singer. 0.300, 0.688 — Blaze Alexander batting vs. David Peterson. 0.293, 0.702 — Miguel Andujar batting vs. Merrill Kelly. 0.292, 0.722 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Ryan Feltner. 0.289, 0.699 — Michael Harris II batting […]  ( 26 min )

Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs posted a game score of 73 to top the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. PCA went two for four, both hits home runs, and drew a walk in a 9-7 win over the Orioles. That brought his OBP up to .386 and his slugging percentage to .542. Yandy Diaz of the […]  ( 26 min )

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More than three years after a jury's verdict, Trump is running out of options to avoid paying the woman who, a jury found in 2023, he had sexually abused and defamed.

Yes I believe we can still win flip this seat this November!

Welcome to our new subscribers, and yes do we have a lot to talk about tonight!!!!!

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET to talk about this and more!

Karthik Chikmagalur suggested that we chat with John Wiegley to find out about the interesting things he's been doing with Org Mode. It was a really cool look at a heavy-duty workflow that dealt with thousands of open items. Since John was sharing his actual Org files instead of a simplified toy example, there was a fair bit of redaction to do. I got all the way to redacting these screenshots, but my brain didn't want to get around to figuring out how to redact the information in a live video where John was scrolling around and stuff. Instead of waiting for either me or Karthik to figure that part out someday, we figured we'd just post the audio, the transcript, and the screenshots. Here you go! Download the audio Chapters 0:00 Getting set up with Zoom, chatting 2:34 Increasing fon…  ( 69 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crp2e5D_Q78 This Sunday I am meeting again with Christian Arzu from the @linkarzu YouTube channel. We will look into the basics of Org mode. How to use it to write documents and organise your life. Our previous meeting about getting started with Emacs is here: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-07-05-emacs-live-with-linkarzu/.  ( 1 min )

here. Another nice feature is the ability to switch between the current buffer and the next (or previous) buffer with C- and C-S- that I added to Emacs1. But I've also configured Vivaldi with a useful Emacs feature. Now it responds to C-S-k by invoking "Close tabs to the Right." Emacs devotees know that C-k is bound to kill-line, which "Kill[s] the rest of the current line...."2 If you imagine that the row of tabs is a line of text, it's natural to expect C-k (or C-S-k) would remove all the tabs to the right of the current tab. Why did I choose the key combination C-S-k instead of C-k? I think at the time C-k performed another function. Or perhaps I felt that it was more appropriate to use two modifier keys for such a significant operation. I rarely need to delete tabs to the left; if I did, I'd bind C-M-S-k to "Close tabs to the Left." You might utter the following complaint, "But C-S-k doesn't work for Gmail; it brings up a virtual keyboard instead!" Correct. So while we're on the topic of Vivaldi key configurations, I'd like to point out that it's possible to tell Vivaldi to ignore a website's key assignment, allowing the key to pass to Vivaldi. Just search for the setting "Browser Priority Shortcuts," click on one of the existing key combinations and press C-S-k to add it to the others. I rely on the web browser's tab history a great deal, too. I'm working on implementing something vaguely similar for Emacs." 1 To get the C- and C-S- to switch buffers, just add this to your init file: (keymap-global-set "C-" 'next-buffer) (keymap-global-set "C-S-" 'previous-buffer) 2 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Killing-by-Lines.html  ( 10 min )

post that explores an artifact from the past: the insert key. Martin, who’s been a Mac head much longer than I have, remembers when Mac keyboards still had an Insert. They no longer do, of course, but my Unicomp Model M clone does as do several other PC keyboards. The key was used to toggle between inserting text and overwriting it. Emacs calls the latter overwrite-mode. The idea of insert mode is that text in front of the cursor is pushed ahead as new text is added behind it. When insert mode is off—that is, when overwrite-mode is active—the text in front of cursor is overwritten. Overwriting text used to be more common but these days everyone uses insert mode and you rarely see it. Still, as Martin says, overwriting can sometimes be useful and if you have an Insert key there’s no reason not to use it in Emacs. That’s a one liner and easy do in your init.el. On the Mac, the Insert key is usually mapped to Help but on other systems it probably has a different mapping so you may have to experiment to discover what it is. Finally, Martin wanted a visual clue as to which mode he was in so he changed the shape of the cursor to reflect the mode. Again, that’s easy to do. He uses overwrite-mode-hook to toggle the cursor shape. While I agree that overwrite-mode can occasionally be useful I don’t—and have never—used it enough to dedicate an actual key to it. I’m perfectly happy to simply call overwrite-mode to turn it on and off.  ( 5 min )

Render Dynamic HTML using plot and qjs.   Lessons Learnt Mouse click generates two events like a keypress. If you are doing a zero byte read, you're likely to miss an event as each read pops the event queue.    References HTML rendering in Emacs  HTML rendering via SVG  Browser in Javascript  Plan 9: Tiled Map  ( 20 min )

Pitcher and coach Phil Regan died today, Wednesday at the nice old age of 89: Regan’s best season as a pitcher and only All-Star appearance came with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966, when he was nicknamed the Vulture by legendary teammate Sandy Koufax because of his penchant for recording wins as a relief pitcher. The right-hander […]  ( 26 min )

Justin Verlander decided to retire at the end of the season: “I never wanted to retire because of a milestone, a number, or a date on the calendar. I wanted the game to tell me when it was time,” Verlander said in a lengthy statement posted to his social media accounts. “Over the last several […]  ( 26 min )

Dylan Cease of the Blue Jays took a no-hitter into the bottom of the ninth inning in San Francisco, having walked three batters up until that point. Heliot Ramos led off with a single, ending the bid and Cease’s day on the mound. He struck out eleven in eight innings as the Blue Jays beat […]  ( 25 min )

The Yankees and Rays play game three of their four game set, each trying to get the edge in the series. Gerrit Cole takes on Shane McClanahan. Back from injury, Cole shows great control with 41 K and 10 walks in 42 2/3 innings, but batters battered him for eight home runs. McClanahan returned to […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.338, 0.739 — Otto Lopez batting vs. George Kirby. 0.300, 0.700 — Xavier Edwards batting vs. George Kirby. 0.291, 0.708 — Ernie Clement batting at Logan Webb. 0.289, 0.676 — Javier Sanoja batting vs. George Kirby. 0.285, 0.670 — Liam Hicks batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs tops the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings after a two for five in a 5-2 win over the Orioles, putting his OBP at .383. He leads Junior Caminero of the Rays by six points after an 0 for 4 in a 6-4 win over the Yankees. Juan Soto of the Mets […]  ( 26 min )

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

Top stories 07/08/2026#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; mso-ta…  ( 6 min )

The DOJ's voter fraud letters aren't about fraud 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 …  ( 3 min )

body,table,td,a{-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;-ms-text-size-adjust:100%}p{margin:0;padding:0;mso-line-height-rule:exactly}table{border-spacing:0}table,td{border-collapse:collapse!important;mso-table-lspace:0;mso-table-rspace:0}div,p,a,li,td,blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly}img{display:block;border:0;line-height:100%;outline:0;text-decoration:none;-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic}*{-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing:grayscale}.ExternalClass{width:100%;line-height:100%}.ExternalClass p,.ExternalClass span,.ExternalClass font,.ExternalClass td,.ExternalClass div{line-height:100%}.ExternalClass *{line-height:100%}.ReadMsgBody{width:100%}u+#body a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;font-weight:inherit;line-height:inherit}img+div…  ( 1 min )

Just when we think Trump can’t go any lower, he finds a way to play politics with disaster aid.  ( 108 min )

The president found a way to insult damn near every one of our allies.  ( 107 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, Billy dives into the tricky question of screen time.  ( 24 min )

Spite is a powerful emotion too often cast in an ugly light. To feel slighted or doubted is a natural urge, as is our desire to press our doubters' eyes up against a window to watch as we prove them wrong. We are taught to repress and do away with such unbecoming resentments. But how else can we stunt on the haters? If there's an underdog story you love, there's a good chance that it required a healthy grudge. By conservative estimates, I would say that half of my greatest accomplishments have come to fruition because I was motivated out of spite. It got me into a prestigious university, it dragged me towards my diploma, and it’s part of why I have this internship. I say without an ounce of shame that I am spiteful to my core. And I can spot one of my own from a mile away.  In the days after he was left off the All-Star Game roster, Zack Wheeler stayed quiet. He let himself be cast as the doubted underdog and had his agent do the talking. Talk B.B. Abbott did, announcing to The Athletic that he was breaking his silence on All-Star snubs to call the decision to leave his client off the roster “tone deaf.” I don’t know what sheet music Abbott is reading, but I would hardly call it anything more than a bit pitchy. (The Justin Verlander legacy nomination, however, is the Fergie national anthem.) Regardless, Abbott talked at length about Wheeler's determination and focus in coming back from thoracic outlet decompression surgery. Abbott painted a perfect portrait of a hardworking yet constantly overlooked ace. But I saw the glimmer of spite in the pitcher’s eyes. When Wheeler took the mound on Tuesday against the Cincinnati Reds, I knew I was about to witness a masterclass.  ( 19 min )

Skylar Diggins, to her credit, isn't one to trade in the classic cryptic fare of her fellow disgruntled athletes. What she writes on social media requires no close reading or careful analysis. There's no Crazy how people switch up on you or TIME WILL TELL with an enigmatic emoji. The Instagram story she posted on Monday was perfectly straightforward: "Now I'm coming off the bench?????? 👍🏽 Cool." https://bsky.app/profile/maggiehendricks.bsky.social/post/3mpyrcswc6c2f Two questions sprang to mind when Diggins signed a two-year, $1.8 million deal with the Chicago Sky this past offseason. How would she coexist with veteran point guard Courtney Vandersloot, who was recovering from an ACL injury but was expected to rejoin the team midseason? (Later, when point guard Natasha Cloud signed with the Sky in free agency, that question expanded.) Also, why was Skylar Diggins, who always speaks up when she feels she's not being treated right, choosing a team famous for not treating players right?  ( 23 min )

As an online basketball fan, you are encouraged by the discourse to consider the Jaylen Brown trade as a matter of asset valuation. One day the Celtics seemed to consider Brown, the asset, as approximately valuable enough to swap for Giannis Antetokounmpo, plus or minus some draft capital. When they didn't complete the trade, it was just possible to believe, for a few minutes, that Celtics president Brad Stevens maybe even considered Brown too valuable for Milwaukee's proposed terms. Then a couple days later the Celtics traded Brown anyway, to the Sixers, for a player a hell of a lot less impressive than Antetokounmpo, and now it seemed like the Celtics viewed Brown, the asset, as worse than expendable: distressed, somehow, and possibly toxic. Naturally there would come an insider tell-all…  ( 26 min )

Vanity pickup trucks: I fucking hate these things, and so you do. The second I see a Dodge Ram SuperUltraMegaSoldierDuty on the highway, I already know that it'll have a Blue Lives Matter decal splashed across its rear windshield, a pristine flatbed untouched by manual labor equipment, and a driver who has no fucking idea how to park. These are vehicles made by assholes, for assholes. Knowing all of that, it was destiny that Dodge, a brand owned by Dutch auto conglomerate Stellantis, would hire one of America's leading assholes to sell its most asshole-ish market offering to America's sizable asshole population. The asshole in question is UFC boss Dana White, all four feet, six inches of him. The product in question is the Dodge Ram pickup truck, which retails for as much as $100,000 and resells for probably a third of that. The TV spot they produced together is, without question, one of the worst things I've ever seen. If you've been watching any of this year's World Cup on Fox, you've already seen this ad far too many times. Here’s the director's cut, if you feel like going on a killing spree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sevVJJSif7w  ( 22 min )

Some things are just timeless. Gossip, for instance, has likely been around as long as humans have been able to communicate with one another, and then share someone else’s business. Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old ice man? Probably a gossiper and definitely a messy guy. Something else just as timeless? Pranks! Normal Gossip is back for its 10th season! Who could have guessed that so many friends had silly, outrageous and harrowing stories they wanted to share with the world. We’re grateful to every listener and everyone who keeps sending us their gossip. To celebrate season 10 we’re bringing back some of your favorite guests and sharing some of the most chaotic gossip ever to grace our inbox! And as you may have heard, Defector is swiveling to video! (We will not use the word “pivot” here.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nwoXWiaSz0  ( 17 min )

The crud-ass New York Mets were able to manage a series split on the road against division-leading Atlanta during the long weekend, overcoming severe bullpen issues for 10-9 and 7-6 victories on Sunday and Monday. But before any fan could even begin to think about letting their guard down or their hopes up, New York returned home to kick off a series with the Royals and deliver another entry in this year's contest for "Most Frustrating Loss." Again, the Mets offense did their part, but Kansas City beat the brakes off some minor-league relievers to win the game 16-12. The Royals play 500 miles from the nearest Defector blogger, and they don't possess the largest payroll in baseball, so we haven't given them a fraction of the attention we've devoted to the Mets. But they've sucked just as bad, albeit in a less spectacularly disappointing way. They spotted the Mets a 9-4 lead through four innings; Carson Benge opened the scoring on a three-run, three-error slapstick display that, defensively, is basically what you do when you want your 6-year-old nephew to feel like he hit a home run. https://youtu.be/XtdNefccOKU?si=1EF7_VoBGGvDyEJm&t=40  ( 16 min )

Heading into this year's Wimbledon, neither Coco Gauff nor Naomi Osaka had made a deep run at the tournament, despite winning a total of six Slams elsewhere. Gauff had peaked at the fourth round, and Osaka at the third round, three times apiece for both players. An observer trying to make sense of this history could argue that their styles of play weren't flattered by the demands of grass-court tennis. Osaka's power game relies on rhythm, which she gets from the ball's consistent and reliable bounces off a hard court; Gauff's raw foot speed and rally tolerance aren't great competitive advantages on a surface where it's so slippery and difficult to defend. They weren't alone in their struggles. For the majority of pro tennis players on both tours, grass appears to be a surface they learn to…  ( 27 min )

SAINT-GAUDENS, France — On Monday morning, the Tour de France's media-wranglers sent us all a text announcing something genuinely shocking for such a French organization: They had banned smoking. The ASO said nobody could smoke in the TV areas "in order to combat fire risks," as that day's racing finished 60 kilometers west of the Trévillach wildfire, which has forced over 12,000 people to evacuate their homes. That day, the race entered France to 44 kilometers of quiet roads after organizers and local politicians told fans to stay away. The next day was the hottest day of racing in the recorded history of the Tour. The smoking ban may have been primarily about avoiding the queasy optics of a ponytailed TV rigman ripping a cigarette on a day with restricted access, though it's a decent met…  ( 32 min )

What’s the sickest action sequence you’ve ever witnessed on screen? I’ll give you five. There’s the tea parlor shootout at the top of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, of course, as well as Jackie Chan’s multi-level shopping mall free-for-all at the close of Police Story. William Friedkin constructed more than a few throughout his career, none better than the stalking-slashing set-piece at the climax of The Hunted. I still don’t know how John Frankenheimer made Ronin’s Paris sedan chase without killing anyone. Ditto the first tanker assault in Mad Max: Fury Road, that symphony of soaring bodies and spiky, speeding metal. By my count, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious adds at least three to the canon. Filmed in Bangkok and set “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” The Furious brings together some of the greatest living martial arts actors from China, Thailand, and Indonesia for 113 minutes of nonstop bodily annihilation. People fight in nightclubs, in open-air market halls, in ice freezers, in police stations, and off the side of a truck. It quite literally kicks ass. The set-up for all this fun is typically grim. A mute plumber named Wang Wei (Chinese direct-to-video superstar Xie Mao) is about to send his young daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) back to her grandparents in China, when the girl is tricked and kidnapped by a human trafficking ring. When the police prove less than helpful, Wang goes in search of them himself, a rescue-and-revenge mission that brings him in (literal) contact with Navin (male model and judo champion Joe Taslim), an independent journalist searching for his wife, who disappeared while investigating the very same trafficking operation.  ( 25 min )

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

.ck-link { text-decoration: underline; } @media only screen { .email * { word-break: break-word; } } @media screen and (max-width: 384px) { .mail-message-content { width: 414px !important; } } @media only screen and (max-width:600px) { .ck-mobile-font-size { font-size:50px !important; } } This is the one thing that helped me knock a bunch of time off of my 10k  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Hi Muneer…  ( 4 min )

96 Bonkers baseball @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 { …  ( 11 min )

It’s Erling Haaland’s World (Cup), And We’re All Just Watching It96 :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 !i…

The Supreme Court is not only transferring political power from Congress to the executive branch. It is also reserving a ton of political power for itself.    The post The Conservative Justices Attached Some Major Strings to the Latest Decision On Presidential Power appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Thanks, Paula.

A recording from Steve Vladeck and Chris Cillizza's live video

Turns out they’re beatable

The latest episode of the MLB Trade Rumors Podcast is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts! Make sure you subscribe as well! You can also use the player at this link to listen, if you don’t use Spotify or Apple for podcasts. This week, host Darragh McDonald is joined by Anthony Franco of […]  ( 9 min )

The month of July kicked off in New York City with two showy stories of couples disrupting life to celebrate their love. On July 1, extreme climbers Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus announced their engagement by scaling the Empire State Building and unfurling a banner from its famous antenna that proclaimed the healing power of love. A few days later — and just two avenue blocks west — pop singer Taylor Swift wed Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden in front of what appeared to be nearly every celebrity imaginable. Outside the arena, digital billboards proclaimed “JusT&T Married!”  Both stunts caused trouble for everyday New Yorkers just trying to live their lives. Police were called out to deal with Nikolau and Beerkus, who put themselves and the people below …  ( 7 min )

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

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

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

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 )

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 )

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…  ( 15 min )

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

I 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 )

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…  ( 12 min )

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

I’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…  ( 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…  ( 13 min )

SEATTLE — You may not have heard it yet, but America’s legal community recently let out a roar here in the Emerald City, a collective call from retired federal judges and a bipartisan array of academics and legal organizations: The rule of law matters, and it will be protected. The two-day symposium, “Neither Sword Nor Purse,” held at the University of Washington School of Law, was necessary because of one person: President Donald J. Trump. His threats against the judiciary and the ease with which he and his administration ignore or boastfully refuse to follow the law are without precedent. He is, quite simply, a threat to judicial independence, and he shows no hesitation to jackhammer the very foundation of our democracy. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and an icon in the conser…  ( 16 min )

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

I 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 )

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…  ( 14 min )

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

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 )

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

I’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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

100 wins in, the fight for fair elections isn't over 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 …  ( 3 min )

New: DOJ letter threatens states over noncitizen 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 …  ( 6 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}.social_block .social-table{display:inline-block!important}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; }…  ( 1 min )

The Democratic Party simply can’t go back to status-quo candidates if it wants to swing the Senate.  ( 112 min )

We need more government officials to stand up to the president’s delusions about the 2020 election.  ( 108 min )

And here I thought the president was supposed to be good at making deals, not breaking them.  ( 111 min )

Recently Hilton Chain[1] put together emacs-guix-starter, a starter Emacs configuration that uses Guix and is set up to Guix. What it is: a regular Emacs init.el (with basic configuration) alongside a companion Guix packages manifest (packages.scm) to install those Emacs packages and all their system dependencies. The init.el even provides configuration to edit Guile! Beginner-oriented configurations are sorely lacking in Guix. In the Emacs world, there are many personal configurations, configuration frameworks (Doom, Spacemacs, Prelude), and starter configs (minimal-emacs.d, emacs-bedrock). These are just great references, if not just to peruse. This is especially the case for newcomers, who haven’t yet developed a second-nature for how to organize files, idiomatic coding patterns, nor fa…

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99GB591Vgo In this video I demonstrate how to define key bindings that have a global overriding effect so that major modes cannot change them. This is important if you want to redefine keys that are not meant to be configured by the user. Below is the code I showed in the video: (setq custom-file (locate-user-emacs-file "custom.el")) (load custom-file t) (load-theme 'modus-operandi-tinted) (use-package keycast :ensure t :config (keycast-mode-line-mode 1)) (set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 180) ;; Your only safe keys are documented here: ;; (info "(elisp) Key Binding Conventions") (define-key global-map (kbd "M-o") 'other-window) ;; (define-key MAP KEY nil) ;; There is also `defvar-keymap'... (defvar prot-overrides-mode-map (make-sparse-keymap) "Keymap for the `prot-overrides-mode'.") (define-minor-mode prot-overrides-mode "Activate the `prot-overrides-mode-map'." :global t :init-value nil :keymap prot-overrides-mode-map) (define-key prot-overrides-mode-map (kbd "M-o") 'other-window) (define-key prot-overrides-mode-map (kbd "C-") 'find-file) (prot-overrides-mode 1)  ( 1 min )

\begin{enumerate} \item One \item Two \item Three \end{enumerate} \begin{enumerate} \item One \begin{enumerate} \item One \item Two \end{enumerate} \item Two \item Three \end{enumerate} 1. One 1. One 2. Two 2. Two 3. Three basic, replicating the Keynote Basic White theme. It’s a very simple theme that has white, gray, and black variations and a title slide with room for the university’s logo. It works well, and gives me everything I need. The only downside is compilation time. A large presentation that I used this week compiled in twelve seconds for the slides, another seventeen seconds for the handout. Then, as it often goes, I immediately notice a mistake, fix, recompile, repeat…. I played with Typst when it first came out. I was impressed, but it …  ( 7 min )

So I have a pair of bash scripts, unimaginatively called in and out. out copies the source tree to the shared folder so the host sees my commits, and in pulls changes back from the host into the VM. Works fine from the terminal, but I live in Emacs, and I want to trigger this from within Emacs rather than jumping to a shell. The obvious answer is to bind a key to async-shell-command and call it done. But then I remembered, Emacs already has this infrastructure - the VC mode's push command. When you press P in a vc-dir buffer, or invoke vc-push from the mode-line popup, Emacs runs vc-git-push which calls git push. I don't want that, I want my out script. The pull side is the same problem. So the question becomes: can I make Emacs's VC commands do something else? Yes, obviously,…

provides an example of why that is. The TL;DR is that in certain edge cases, things like differing syntax tables can make code behave differently in Org mode than it does directly in Emacs. Take a look at his post for the details. I have to say that I’ve never run into this problem. Perhaps that’s because I usually use Org code blocks only for code that will be executed in the Org environment. The few times that I have run the code outside of Org, I haven’t run into the problems that Zeitler describes. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it’s good to be aware that there are some edge cases that can reach out and bite you if you’re not careful. Most of you, I’m sure, will have my experience but it pays to be aware of what can go wrong.  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR A key feature is missing from most Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMSs): define a concept by pressing a keybinding on a word, and from then on all occurrences of that word become live, actionable links everywhere. This capability would transform your knowledge base from a siloed graph into an omniscient second brain. That is the unique feature of the HyWiki part of the GNU Hyperbole package for Emacs, a wiki whose only syntax is the HyWikiWord: a PascalCased word like Emacs or EmacsCompletion, without the link delimiters ([[ ]]) other PKMSs require. Because a WikiWord is a Hyperbole implicit button, once defined it is highlighted and actionable in every text and programming buffer, not just inside a siloed notes vault. This lets you keep the messy majority of yo…  ( 29 min )

The Emacs Carnival collects submissions by hand: you write your post, then notify the host by comment, DM (Reddit, Mastodon...) or email. The IndieWeb solves this with Webmentions, but that requires your blog to send them and the host's blog to receive them, which most static Emacs blogs don't support. Org Social can do better: it is a federated social network, and it can be used to run a carnival without any extra software. Publish or announce Add a post to your social.org with the agreed tag emacs-carnival. ** 2026-08-05T10:00:00+0200 :PROPERTIES: :TAGS: emacs-carnival :END: Check out [[https://my-blog.example/carnival-post/][my entry for this month's Emacs Carnival]]. That's it. No endpoint, no microformats, no notification step: one tagged post. Read the submissions Client The first option is a client: org-social.el, or any other client, can filter the timeline by tag. Browse emacs-carnival and you are reading the carnival, no extra tooling involved. JSON For scripts and roundups, you can use the Org Social Relay API: curl "https://relay.org-social.org/search/?tag=emacs-carnival" It returns a paginated JSON list with the permalink of every submission. RSS feed You don't need an Org Social account to follow along. Subscribe from any feed reader: https://relay.org-social.org/rss.xml?tag=emacs-carnival Each item includes the author, the content and the permalink. Conclusion If you use a static blog and want to participate in the Emacs Carnival, consider using Org Social. It allows you to publish your submission with a simple tag, and others can easily read and follow the submissions through clients, the JSON API, or RSS feeds. This approach simplifies the process and makes it more accessible for everyone involved.  ( 2 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 )

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

The 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 )

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 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 )

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

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

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

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

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 )

The Royals have signed right-hander Justin Topa to a minor league deal, according to his transactions tracker at MLB.com. He has been assigned to Triple-A Omaha. The Blue Jays released him from a minor league deal a couple of days ago. Topa, 35, has some major league success but is not having a good year. […]  ( 7 min )

The Brewers called up outfield prospect Luis Lara after signing him to a seven-year, $31 million extension earlier this season. He stands five feet seven inches. With Class AAA Nashville this season, Lara has a career-high nine homers (matching his career high in 25 games), plus 24 stolen bases and a .902 OPS in 346 […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these stop projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.322, 0.704 — Freddie Freeman batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.314, 0.694 — Miguel Rojas batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.311, 0.689 — Shohei Ohtani batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.306, 0.683 — Andy Pages batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.305, 0.704 — Miguel Andujar batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Juan Soto of the Mets moved back into the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings with a home run and three walks in a 7-6, 10 inning win over the reeling Braves. Soto is in a 22 game stretch in which he’s hitting .375/.521/.708. The big game puts him in fourth place. Pete […]  ( 26 min )

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Department of Justice warns election officials they could be criminally charged over noncitizen voters96 :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 !i…  ( 5 min )

96 Power up: It's a Royal run-scoring extravaganza @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: …  ( 10 min )

This week at SCOTUS, a student previously diagnosed with schizophrenia has been detained for 13 months. Also: An appellate academic freedom win. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't panicking. "I don't think it's anything drastic. It's just a play here, a play there, a call here, a call there," he said after Atlanta's 88-83 loss to Golden State on Saturday, his team's fifth straight loss. "I think as soon as we have one game where we shoot it the way we normally shoot it, I think then we'll be through the struggles that we're seeing right now." I won't pretend this circular logic is especially satisfying, but it's true that a coach can only do so much when their team is shooting the way Atlanta is right now. Across those five losses, the Dream shot 26 percent from three and just 38.4 percent from the field—not what you want. It was a bit of a surprise that the team won't have any players starting in the All-Star Game later this month, but the snub has not exactly powered the team's wing duo to greatness. Allisha Gray is shooting 16 percent from three and 35.2 percent from the field in this losing stretch. Rhyne Howard, a stout defender, found herself on the wrong end of a couple of Gabby Williams masterclasses in the past couple weeks. Smesko might feel calm because he knows the team isn't in its fully realized form yet. Brionna Jones, expected to start at center, has been out recovering from knee surgery she had before the start of the season. We'll soon find out how much of Atlanta's problems are due to plain incompleteness: Jones was a full participant in Tuesday's Dream practice.  ( 22 min )

For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round of 16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anything other than something we've never seen before feels, well, terrible. Messi spent the first 79 minutes of the match misplaying passes, dribbling to nowhere, missing yet another penalty—boy, am I glad that he made his two penalties in the 2022 World Cup final, or we'd never hear the end of it—and watching helplessly as Egypt hunkered down, rode goalie Mostafa Shobeir through some incredible saves, and scored not once but twice. Seventy-nine minutes had gone, and while Argentina controlled the balance of play, the scoreboard didn't lie. Egypt had been deadlier and more efficient with its chances, while Argentina looked out of ideas and, crucially, almost out of time. That's the thing about having Messi on your team, though. Until the final whistle blows, there is always time. In this case, all it took was four minutes for Messi to do what he has done more than perhaps any player in the history of soccer: Rescue his team from the jaws of defeat through sheer willpower and otherworldly talent. In four minutes, Messi roared to life. All it took was one dribble where he looked like Young Messi—or at least the Younger Messi who dismantled poor Josko Gvardiol at the 2022 World Cup—to wake him up. That dribble didn't end in a goal, but fast forward just a few second later, and his talent would make the difference. The first Argentina goal was actually the kind of assist that Messi doesn't do all that often, which makes it all the more entertaining to watch. This was just a simple cross, cutting inside on his left from the right wing before lobbing it at a perfectly timed Cristian Romero run, which allowed the Tottenham captain to head the ball with enough power to get through Shobeir's save attempt.  ( 22 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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more. Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business. Your letters:  ( 50 min )

On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards, watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at Defenders Academy, a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court.  Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a courtroom has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her back to share her talents with public defenders. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  ( 29 min )

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound: Players are probably less likely to do a racismo if their lips can be easily read in the moment, potentially heading off the kind of paralytic he-said-he-said that protected Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni in his racism incident with Vinícius last season. Alas, FIFA's anti-racism protocols hold no sway in the real world, and they especially have no jurisdiction in the realm of good old-fashioned politician racism. Enter Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, a member of the country's center-left Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico party, who posted (and later deleted) a brutally offensive rant directed at Kylian Mbappé following Paraguay's 1-0 loss to France. As translated by The Madrid Zone: This brute hasn't even learned to write. Instead of breastmilk, he grew up sucking on coconuts, and the most educated creatures he ever heard were chimpanzees. You should've given him the middle finger, Orlando Gill (Paraguay GK). A colonized Cameroonian, pretending to be French, resentful, newly rich, arrogant, and ugly. He was nervous and scared to death all game, like his whole team. They didn't even manage to score a single goal, until they got lucky with a penalty. The only thing many of us blame the team for is not giving him a full-handed slap at the end of the game. I'm not even a football fan.  ( 22 min )

Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well, now that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to be a United States Senator, a position he has held since 1985. Could one not then argue that he is in fact the livingest guy around? What after all is "a pulse"? Many things throb rhythmically. That is nothing special. That is not what makes something alive. A disco beat throbs. Is a disco beat "alive"? Does it have highly remunerated aides whose entire livelihood depends on its continuing ability to occupy elected office, who will attest to it being "alive," three weeks after paramedics traveled to the disco beat's house to treat someone there who had gone into cardiac arrest, and with no one having seen the disco beat in public since then? You have really got a lot to think about right now, in my opinion. A heartbeat after all is a rhythm. A series of beats. In between the beats, it is not beating. Is it "dead" in those intervals? What if some of the intervals are longer than others? Athletes and the very fit often have slower heartbeats than others, and this is a sign of health. Bear that in mind when you feel qualified to draw conclusions about a heart that beats very slowly. If you are not jumping out from behind a shower curtain to screech "Dead! Dead! Dead!" at LeBron James in between each of his mighty and well-spaced heart contractions, then to state as fact that the brazenly evil avatar of obstructive minority rule in the United States is a corpse in the interval (three weeks and counting) between two of his even more powerfully spaced-out heartbeats makes you a hypocrite. I do not think that is the kind of example you are trying to set for your children.  ( 23 min )

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and went inside. This decision, if it was in fact a choice or rather the result of a chance oceanic current, offered some obvious benefits to the baby crab. A plastic bottle offers precious shelter to something so small, soft-shelled, and delicious. So the crab stayed, feeding on whatever else swam or drifted into the bottle's small opening. As the months went by, the crab grew larger. On July 15, 2022, a group of researchers sailed a small boat off the coast of Sesoko Island in Okinawa, Japan. They were searching for oceanic nurseries: floating objects like driftwood and sargassum that shelter larval fish in that vulnerable stage of their lives. The researchers saw the bobbing whitish bottle was surrounded by larval fish, which they scooped up with a net. There were two baby rough triggerfish, five rainbow runner, five Indo-Pacific sergeant, and one freckled driftfish—a veritable daycare. And then the researchers peeked inside the bottle, which was furred with algal growth and encrusted in barnacles. And they saw the crab. She was a three-spot swimming crab, about the size of a business card, and she was missing her third leg. It was immediately clear she could not escape via the mouth of the bottle, which was less than an inch wide. The researchers wondered how she'd gotten inside the bottle in the first place, and how long she'd been there.  ( 21 min )

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is. Well, in the wake of Monday night's dopeslap in Seattle, in which the USMNT was the face and Belgium the gloved hand, there are so many lessons to absorb, and that's even after you leaven off the top 35 percent of the vitriol, which is just snark from late-to-the-party nitwits. That's the first thing, maybe—that when you open the tent to everyone, the quality of the guests necessarily drops. The amount of abuse the USMNT will take as an adjunct to the amount of abuse it took from the allegedly past-their-sell-by-date Belgians will be impressive, and will lead necessarily to a harsher reassessment of soccer in America, and how it is never going to amount to anything, and how you should just buy more beer and wait for training camp. And for some of you, maybe, that should be the lesson. You came to see what the party was like. It was fun for a while, then it came time to clean the hall and you fled like a rabbit, saying the party sucked anyway. It was just a way for you to kill time until training camp, and good for you, we suppose. You got something out of it, even if it wasn't anything satisfying.  ( 22 min )

Perhaps it's a sign from Mother Nature that the two flagship events of the Philadelphia's Wawa Welcome America Festival for the semiquincentennial were derailed by weather. Maybe she was telling us to stop this embarrassing exhibition of unbridled nationalism and look inward. But if she thought that she could succeed in getting Americans to self-reflect, even by replicating the conditions of the depths of hell where our leaders will surely burn, she was sorely mistaken. How naive! Clearly she has never truly contended with the levels of blinding patriotism of the average American, or the masochistic tenacity of a Defector intern who will sacrifice anything to get the story. Despite the temperature reaching nearly 100 degrees in the middle of the day, I embarked on my expedition. The closer I got to Philadelphia's Old City, the deeper I ventured into a different version of the United States than the one I was used to. This version looked like the mind of Uncle Sam suffering from post-concussion syndrome. The air was filled with the smell of fried dough, port-a-potties, and the dissolution of the EPA. Scattered "U-S-A" chants carried across the neighborhood, just in case anyone forgot what country we lived in. Street vendors and Christian proselytizers stood side by side on the pavement, in a heartwarming testament to the American spirit and the Protestant ethic. Sunburnt and khaki-clad families walked around while wearing garish AI-generated shirts that featured uncomfortably ripped George Washingtons, or said things like "I can't hear you over the sound of my freedom." Even a food delivery robot trucked along with a little American flag.  ( 27 min )

It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team that plays enough of them will have their specific strengths and shortcomings put on display, some more immutable than others. The teams that tend to thrive in the World Cup are the ones most capable of shrinking the distance between the best and worst versions of themselves, such that the arrival of either is not overly surprising or destabilizing. On Monday, Belgium reached through the swagger and confidence that the USMNT had spent four games building, and drew out a fragility that lurked deep within. Unprepared to face the worst version of themselves, the Americans crumbled. It is not often that the complete story of a soccer game can be told by its goals alone, but it is true of this game. Each of the four goals Belgium scored in its 4-1 victory can be held up as a tidy encapsulation of the USMNT's dispiriting performance. The first: a tap-in that was created by Nicholas Raskin being allowed to control a loose ball and dribble through the American box while four USMNT defenders stood by and watched. The second: a header at the back post in which two defenders on the ball failed to stop the cross and two defenders on the post were out-muscled by the goalscorer. The third: a completely fucking humiliating sequence in which Matt Freese got marooned outside his box, kicked the ground instead of the ball, and watched helplessly as the Belgians poked it into an empty net. The fourth: Chris Richards gifting the ball to Romelu Lukaku in his own box and watching the big Belgian stomp his way to a goal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL3kCTgeVKA  ( 22 min )

Wagtail as Admin, Random Values, Code Quality, and More body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100% !important; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } img,a img{ border:0; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ margin:0; padding:0; } p{ margin:1em 0; padding:0; } a{ word-wrap:break-word; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass,.ExternalClass p,.ExternalClass span,.ExternalClass font,.ExternalClass td,.ExternalClass div{ line-height:100%; } …  ( 5 min )

The list of reasons Trump’s former lawyer is unfit to hold judicial office just got longer and weirder. The post Emil Bove’s Trump iPhone Wallpaper Might Be the Most Deranged Thing About Him appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Four times, they reached for something that wasn’t theirs. Four times, they lost.

Let's focus on making tomorrow a better day.......

We last heard from the New York City duo, Ill Al Skratch, in 1994 with their debut album, Creep Wit’ Me. The album spawned two moderately successful singles, but neither racked up any hardware (aka RIAA gold or platinum plaques), … Continue reading →  ( 18 min )

Finally, a shadow docket decision that is good for the United States. The post FIFA Is Only the Latest Corrupt Institution to Grant Donald Trump’s Emergency Request appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

The Fifth Circuit is already the federal judiciary’s most aggressive incubator of MAGA legal activism. Kurt Engelhardt’s retirement has given President Donald Trump another opportunity to make it worse. The post Kurt Englehardt’s Retirement Is Going to Make the Fifth Circuit Even Trumpier appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 9 min )

The Giants have claimed right-hander Eric Cerantola off waivers from the Royals, according to his transactions tracker at MLB.com. The Royals designated him for assignment last week. Cerantola has been assigned to Triple-A Sacramento, so they don’t need a corresponding move to open an active roster spot. San Francisco also outrighted reliever Gregory Santos off the […]  ( 7 min )

The Royals tagged Phillies starter Cristopher Sanchez for nine earned runs in 3 1/3 innings enroute to a 15-1 victory. It was the highest number of runs allowed in a game in Sanchez’s career. This caught my eye, however: In the bottom of the first, Bobby Witt Jr. scored on fielder’s choice when the Phillies […]  ( 26 min )

If you are rooting for the US in tonight’s World Cup match and and get upset with anything the Belgium team does, Monty Python has you covered:  ( 25 min )

With only eight games on Monday, one pitching matchup stands out. The Yankees visit the Rays, Tampa Bay holding a four-game lead in the AL East over the reeling Bronx Bombers. Cam Schlittler faces Griffin Jax. The Yankees rotation served as a strength up until 6/19. At that point the starters owned a 3.23 ERA, […]  ( 26 min )

Every Monday Baseball Musings compares the offense of the current season to the previous season through the same number of full weeks. Through 14 full weeks major league games generated 9.04 runs per game compared to 8.73 runs per game in 2025. The big difference continues to be walks, up 0.4 per game from last […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.333, 0.715 — Freddie Freeman batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.328, 0.708 — Miguel Rojas batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.318, 0.696 — Andy Pages batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.317, 0.696 — Shohei Ohtani batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.309, 0.709 — Yordan Alvarez batting at […]  ( 26 min )

Otto Lopez of the Marlins posted a game score of 76 on Sunday, fourth highest on the day. That propelled him to fourth in the Baseball Musing Batter Rankings. Lopez went three for four with a double and a home run in the 9-8 win over the Athletics. He functions as a hit machine. His […]  ( 26 min )

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Election deniers are changing their rhetoric. Here’s why 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 )

Yesterday I wrote that I prefer putting each code snippet into its own dedicated file rather than into an org source block because "I don't want the code to execute with org-mode active." What was I thinking; what does it mean? Here's a scenario. I'm developing functions to create a document in some markup language. The colorizer function applies a color tag to the first word in a given string. It works great in my Org source block. But when I add it to the lisp file and invoke it, it doesn't do exactly what I expect. In Org mode, the single quote is a word constituent, which is fine for my purpose. However, in emacs-lisp-mode, single quote is a separator. The effect is demonstrated below. Note the code in the testre.el file tags only "Sophia," not "Sophia's," while the source block applies the tag as intended. (defun colorizer (s) "Add blue color tag to first word in S." (interactive) (replace-regexp-in-string "\\(\\w+\\)\\(.+\\)" "blue{\\1}\\2" s t)) (defun testre () "Test colorizer." (interactive) (message (concat (colorizer "Blanche lives in Miami.") " " (colorizer "Sofia's sweater is yellow.")))) (testre) #+RESULTS: : blue{Blanche} lives in Miami. blue{Sofia’s} sweater is yellow. Here's what the code in the testre.el file produces: blue{Blanche} lives in Miami. blue{Sofia}’s sweater is yellow. Another problem with having Org mode active in a lisp source block is that indenting doesn't work as expected. Pressing C-M-\ does nothing (if I'm lucky) or something undesirable. Once I activate emacs-lisp-mode, C-M-\ makes the code look nice again. (If I re-activate Org mode the buffer reloads, and I lose my place in the document.) This makes sense when you recall that C-M-\ is bound to indent-according-to-mode. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, or I have something misconfigured.  ( 9 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0  ( 1 min )

Underappreciated Emacs built-ins. Looking for something to write about next? "Programming" is the Emacs Carnival theme for July. Thanks to Ross for hosting in June and Andy for hosting in July. Also, there was a fair bit of discussion about The GNU Emacs Architecture : Unlocking the Core. Have fun! Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #7 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/88d59360-d89a-42cc-b567-ed39ac5186fb Mon Jul 6 1900 CET OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Jul 8 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jul 9 0000 Asia/Singapore Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Jul 10 1800…  ( 4 min )

Now we just need someone to look into his crypto earnings.  ( 114 min )

By pulling strings to ensure Folarin Balogun plays in the next game for the U.S. national team, the president may have accidentally undermined part of his agenda.  ( 110 min )

Not only did the president try and fail spectacularly to quote the Declaration of Independence; he also tried to make McCarthyism great again.  ( 109 min )

Breaking News - After new accusations of sexual assault Graham Platner is "taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” for his candidacy

Stuart dropped by for our monthly chat earlier today, and it was a very good one....

Stuart Stevens joins us live today at 12pm ET/The US Men play tonight at 8pm ET!

Stuart Stevens joins us live today at 1pm ET/The US Men play tonight at 8pm ET!

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

96 Extras: Here for It, #364 @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-li…  ( 9 min )

96 The Royals cruise to victory @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…  ( 11 min )

The ‘Free Flo Balogun’ Walkouts Worked96 :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: inheri…  ( 7 min )

You weren't watching MLB.TV on Sunday, because NBC bought out all of the day's games and locked most of them behind their billions-losing streaming service. But if you were tuned in for out-of-market baseball in the days prior, like I was, you may have been delivered an advertisement from MLB itself that served as a stark reminder of just how badly the league's owners want to cap their players' salaries. The commercials on MLB.TV are part of the league's "Level The Playing Field" campaign, which seeks to turn public opinion against teams with high payrolls ahead of what looks to be an especially nasty lockout after this season ends. MLB owners want to seize this next labor stoppage as an opportunity to finally get their much-desired salary cap, and the increase in team valuations that follows, at the expense of a workforce that has long resisted this restriction on their earning potential. "Give every fan a fair chance," the campaign begs, pitching supporters of low-payroll teams like the Guardians on the idea that they're only going to win a World Series if high-spending teams like the Dodgers are brought to heel. The ad I got was a zippier version of the second video on this page, which is a cutesy series of graphics that don't hold up to much scrutiny. For example, it uses a CBS Sports headline, "Does MLB need a salary cap?" from a post in which all four analysts go on to answer "No." It classifies the Florida Panthers as a "small-market" team that was recently able to win two Stanley Cups in the salary-capped NHL, which feels like willful ignorance of both the Miami metropolitan area's size and the Panthers' ability to attract big-name players. By the way, if only "large-market" teams have won the World Series in the last decade, then how are the Washington Nationals ranked 27th in payroll right now? If the Cubs are "large-market," then why are the Chicago White Sox down at 28th?  ( 19 min )

BARCELONA — "Pogito! Hermano! Ya eres Mexicano!" sang the gathered dozens. Over an hour after Isaac del Toro won Stage 2 of the Tour de France, an enthusiastic knot of 40-ish tricolor-clad fans was still patiently at the barriers. Some came from Mexico, some lived in Barcelona. Most had been there sweating in the unrelenting sun since early afternoon, though what's that compared to the 36-year wait for a Mexican rider to win again at the sport's biggest race, as Raul Alcala did in 1990? While their hero was doing TV interviews, taking the obligatory doping tests, and regaling the for-some-reason seven-person French TV desk, the fans threw a party. They sang "Cielito Lindo" and "El Rey" and chanted for Alcala as he soaked in del Toro's moment; when del Toro finally emerged, the crowd roared as the 22-year-old came over for some brief high-fives on his way back to his team bus as if he were floating. He was as exhausted as they were uplifted. Del Toro's win isn't altogether surprising, though as Tadej Pogacar's honorary Mexicanhood hints, del Toro's biggest career triumph was not the most straightforward win. The Tour's official press communique announced "Pogacar gifts Montjuïc win to del Toro," which is both a bizarre bit of anti-marketing—don't you want people to revel in a young superstar winning the first Tour stage of his career?—and a harsh way to characterize the day's racing. As the peloton hit the bottom of the final climb, del Toro poured everything he had into the 50-second effort. Jonas Vingegaard couldn't hold his wheel. Remco Evenepoel couldn't either. Probably Pogacar could have, though del Toro blasted off so hard on his initial attack that he earned a huge gap, which Pogacar was happy to patrol. Nobody could touch del Toro, who crossed the line in joint celebration with Pogacar.  ( 29 min )

Matt Miller, an on-air NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, is presently recovering from, among other injuries, the emergency amputation of his left arm. Probably there are not too many kinds of trouble in Miller's life that measure up against that one. But trouble is waiting, and not very patiently: The Missouri Attorney General's office confirmed late last week that it is actively investigating Miller on consumer-protection grounds. In the time since he and his family mobilized public support around his injuries, Miller has been accused by dozens of aggrieved football fans of running scams in fantasy sports, career coaching, and charity fundraising. Miller posted to Twitter on June 23 that, a week earlier, he'd been involved in a serious road accident in Missouri. Friends of Miller's told local KOAM News that Miller was the driver of the more severely wrecked side of a two-vehicle collision on a state highway in Jasper County. On the afternoon of June 17, Miller's Ford Bronco reportedly crossed over the center line into westbound traffic and plowed into an oncoming semi-trailer, dealing shocking devastation to Miller's vehicle and body. Miller's family quickly established a GoFundMe campaign to raise $10,000 toward his medical expenses, and the campaign was promoted by several of Miller's high-profile ESPN colleagues. "As a result of the accident, I sustained significant injuries, including multiple fractures and broken ribs. I also underwent a life-saving amputation of my left arm," Miller wrote on Twitter. "While I have a long road ahead, I’m focused on my recovery and taking things one day at a time. Thank you for the overwhelming support, prayers and kind messages—they have meant so much to me and my family during this time."  ( 20 min )

Just a day after FIFA rescind Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round of 16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, the story keeps on rolling thanks to FIFA's innate FIFA-ness. On Monday, the Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement about the whole mess, which has raised the twin specters of corruption and incompetence. The RBFA's statement is a doozy. The association claims it learned of Balogun's un-suspension not from FIFA itself, but through the media reports coming from the tournament press on Sunday. Likely confused and certainly more than a little angry, the RBFA sent a letter to FIFA "requesting a copy of the decision, an explanation of the process that had been followed, and setting out its position regarding the applicable regulations." This is a reasonable request to make, and though FIFA failed to communicate to Belgium the results of their decision about Balogun prior to it leaking to the press, FIFA could have turned that into a minor oversight by simply sharing its reasoning with the RBFA. Not so fast, my friends! Because this is FIFA, things got very weird after Belgium sent that their request for clarity. The next part of the RBFA statement reads: As its only response, FIFA sent a letter to the RBFA stating that it considered this correspondence to constitute an appeal, that a judge had been appointed, and that the RBFA had only a few hours to complete that appeal. No information whatsoever was provided by FIFA.  ( 18 min )

If there could have been a story to rival England's Jordan Henderson getting yellow carded and then breaking his arm without actually playing, it would have been Brian Serven homering in the ninth inning of Marlins-Athletics to complete the comeback di tutti comebacks, and that's even allowing for the fact that England-Mexico at the Azteca was arguably a more momentous event than Marlins-Athletics no matter where it was played. That it was played in West Sacramento just added to the mutant beauty of a day in which the Marlins... ... got seven innings of perfect pitching from Eury Pérez and provided him with a seemingly insurmountable 8-0 lead.  ( 20 min )

Stay in line, and do our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Peggy Sue Marlin, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Peggy Sue works in systems and data automation and enjoys golfing and DIY projects. She won her school spelling bee on the word "cheeseburger," then was eliminated at regionals on "asphyxiation." Her parents shared her disappointment, though they were secretly relieved she didn't know that word yet. Fortunately, dealing with that level of heartbreak at a young age prepared her perfectly for a lifetime of rooting for the Cubs. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

I think it's important we set some axioms for discussion of Anaheim's Leo Carlsson signing an offer sheet with Philadelphia, because it helps a superficially mindblowing contract feel something closer to logical—both in that the Flyers were wise to offer it, and in that the Ducks would be fools not to match it. The first thing to be agreed upon is that Carlsson is very, very good: 21 years old, putting up better numbers every year, 67 points in his third season. Whether you think he's neared his ceiling already or whether you believe he's got much more room to grow, he's a great and valuable player right now, full stop. He'd be a 1C on something like 20–25 teams in the NHL, certainly on the Ducks or Flyers, and 1Cs don't come cheap. The second thing to agree on is that while the Flyers' of…  ( 23 min )

Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped The Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness of his voice. It was an unusual thing to see, but befitting of the game Kane had just played, which was so strange, so dramatic, that it was easy to imagine most everyone who watched or played in it being left speechless. Too much is often made of the effects of home field advantage in sports, but soccer is one where, in certain circumstances, the environment and crowd can have a material influence over what happens on the field. There's not really any other way to explain Mexico, a middling and often uninspiring international team in most circumstances, basically never losing when they play at The Azteca. It made sense, then, that so much of the pregame analysis was focused on how England would handle playing at altitude, in front of a ferocious crowd of 87,000, against a team that feels invincible whenever it steps into that particular stadium. I figured if England could make it to the first hydration break without wobbling too badly, they'd be in good position to slowly gain control of the match through their superior talent. Everything went according to plan for England. An early header from Raúl Jiménez that seemed destined for the bottom corner was palmed away by Jordan Pickford, and suddenly a half-hour had passed without Mexico gaining too much of a foothold. And then, in the span of two minutes, it seemed that Jude Bellingham had singlehandedly removed The Azteca's mystique. His head met a cross at the back post to make it 1-0 England in the 36th minute, and then in the 38th he was there to finish off a move that started with Mexico giving the ball away in its own end.  ( 24 min )

Proof the momentum is ours heading into the midterms

The Supreme Court made plenty of headlines last week. Today's "One First" is devoted to some of the biggest things that happened *away from* those headlines.

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 )