The person in the photo above is not a strange wanderer whose arrival at the local inn coincided with that of a growing pestilence. That is Chicago Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman, photographed in the dugout two nights ago. Bregman looks like that because he was struck by a foul ball while standing in the on-deck circle during last Sunday's game against the Reds. He suffered multiple facial fractures, which is obvious by the look of him. Here he is this morning arriving at Wrigley Field: https://bsky.app/profile/sambernero.bsky.social/post/3mwbixcj6tc2d  ( 14 min )

The second project is probably always the hardest. This is especially true if it follows a successful debut. You make something great, and by some act of the gods it catches fire and becomes the new, hot thing—a one-in-a-million shot. But then comes the next thing, the followup to your great big deal of a project. It’s a haunting and intense proposition. When I was at NYU for an MFA, I met a lot of famous and successful authors, and I remember one of the pieces of advice was to just write the next book as fast as you can. The more you put it off, the more you will paralyze yourself.  There’s no question that Rivers Cuomo felt some paralysis after Weezer's 1994 self-titled album. Known colloquially as The Blue Album, it is a true achievement of '90s power pop-punk. Twelve perfect songs, produced by The Cars' Ric Ocasek, full of nerdy irreverence and offbeat songwriting that manages to stick like it’s the fucking Beatles or something. But on top of this newly signed band releasing a well-constructed album, they became MTV darlings thanks to Spike Jonze's videos for "Undone (The Sweater Song)" and "Buddy Holly." https://youtu.be/kemivUKb4f4?si=po0-0MLY-g-_PN2k  ( 34 min )

The NFL schedule is not likely to renew the fading historical rivalry between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks. The two teams are now separated by the conference divide, and, though both teams are currently good, you'd be a fool to bet on the Super Bowl producing any particular matchup, especially one featuring Bo Nix's ass. But though proximity cannot suffice, the rivalry was juiced up this week by an out-of-nowhere controversy involving the teams' head coaches and some shit that went down behind the scenes two years ago. Mike Macdonald took over as head coach of the Seahawks in January 2024. Months later, in the run-up to the season, Macdonald prepared his team for a Week 1 matchup with the Broncos in part by finding and reviewing fan footage of Denver's training camp. Macdona…  ( 22 min )

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. An internet lifetime ago, ESPN football columnist Gregg Easterbrook was one of my go-to reads. Easterbrook was a pundit for The Atlantic by day, but moonlit over at ESPN's Page 2 to write his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column every week during the NFL season. TMQ included tons of snooty jokes that only George Will would find funny, but it also served as the tip of the spear in introducing analytics to the mainstream football discourse. I hate giving Greggggggg credit for anything, because he’s an eternally haughty dipshit. But he was a notable part of my education as a football fan, and I was an easier mark for his shtick back then than I am now. For 20-something me, it was worth enduring Easterbrook’s preciousness to read his more entertaining copy, which often recounted strategic errors that NFL teams routinely made simply because those teams hadn’t looked at the data. It was through Easterbrook’s column that I first understood, mathematically, why punting was dumb. And it was Easterbrook who conditioned me to believe that blitzing too often, particularly on third downs, was a recipe for disaster. He had a recurring section in TMQ for failed blitzes titled "Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!" I read that every word of that section, every week. That was because I had watched my own team’s defense get burned in such instances enough times to believe that Easterbrook’s line of thinking was sound, and that his methodology was airtight.  ( 38 min )

The 2026 NWSL season has provided some astonishingly fun soccer, and many off-field successes too: The league has boasted some record attendances, salaries, and goal-scoring this year, not to mention a few signings from at least a couple of the big European clubs it lusts after. But recently there have been too many reminders that although the NWSL has raised its ceiling, the floor is still in hell. On Sept. 13, Savannah DeMelo, the star Racing Louisville midfielder who suffered a cardiac arrest during a game in Seattle in September 2025, filed a lawsuit against the team’s medical provider, UofL Health, as well as two of her doctors, for negligence. The lawsuit states that the doctors should have caught the heart condition that was a substantial cause of her cardiac arrest—it was instead caught by doctors in Seattle after the fact. The suit stated that DeMelo "has incurred medical, hospital, and other care-related expenses, and will continue to incur such expenses in the future, has lost income, has suffered a permanent impairment in her power to labor and earn money, and has experienced severe physical and mental pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life, and will continue to so suffer into the future."  ( 22 min )

A week ago, we explained in scabrous detail the multiplicity of shortcomings of the American League by focusing on the Central division and blaming it at least indirectly on the Pope's inability to close. But like most short-term trend stories in baseball, it quickly proved to be in error. Defector regrets not just the misidentification but also hiring the nitwit who made the observation. Steps, we assure you, will be taken. In fact, it is not the AL Central that was dragging down the class but the AL West, where mediocrity is a possibly unreachable goal rather than a curse and some aggressively mediocre team will win the division. Having committed to this bit so deep into the season, the winner of the division will do well to avoid finishing below .500; there is nothing to do but embrace the AL West of it all. A week ago, when we mocked the AL Central, we failed to take into account Cleveland's upcoming series with West Sacramento, which of course the Guardians swept because that's what a baseball team does when the A's come to town. (If you have to go to them, you just win two out of three and feel like you let a golden opportunity pass.) The Guards now lead the division with a gaudy 82-76 record and cannot finish below .500, a familiar late-season push that has elevated them to bland and dull rather than charmingly embarrassing. A suiting division champ, in other words.  ( 21 min )

INSIDE: Timothy Kelly ... Betsy Klein ... Donald Trump

opines that since the advent of use-short-answers, confirm-kill-emacs should be a boolean. His idea is that confirm-kill-emacs should merely specify whether to ask for confirmation or not and let use-short-answers choose the the particular form of the question if one is requested. 00-11 notes that Danrobi1 is misunderstanding the purpose of the confirm-kill-emacs variable: it was never about whether to call yes-or-no-p or y-or-n-p to ask if quitting Emacs is really what you want. What its purpose is and was is to specify a predicate that will decide whether to quit Emacs or not. There’s no reason it even has to communicate with the user. It just has to decide whether to quit or not based on whatever logic is coded into it. I’ve had it set to y-or-n-p for as long as I can remember and haven’t thought about it in all that time. But 00-11’s response got me thinking. I originally set it to y-or-n-p because I kept inadvertently quitting Emacs by fat fingering some other shortcut and I’ve never looked back but there is one problem. If I don’t remember to quit Emacs before rebooting my MacBook Pro, the reboot will hang waiting for Emacs to quit. That usually happens when there’s an OS update that I start off when I go to bed expecting to have a new OS in the morning only to find the system still waiting for Emacs to quit. What if I could detect if my Mac is being rebooted? If I can, I can easily code up a predicate function that quits Emacs if so and calls y-or-n-p if not. The thought just popped into my mind so I haven’t had a chance to research it yet but it seems promising.  ( 5 min )

M-w, and you get more than you bargained for: the kill ring receives the hidden text as well. Folding is only a display trick - the text is still in the buffer, and kill-ring-save dutifully copies every character between the region boundaries, ellipsis and all. Paste that into an email or a chat and the hidden notes come along for the ride. The fix, in my config, is a prefix argument: C-u M-w copies only the visible text of the region, leaving everything folded or hidden behind. Plain M-w is unchanged. I have been a fan of org-copy-visible ever since I discovered it works outside Org - back in 2023 I was using it in dired with dired-hide-details-mode to copy just the filenames. The only friction was having to remember M-x org-copy-visible instead of my muscle-memory M-w. So I taught my existing my/kill-ring-save wrapper a another trick: hand it a prefix argument and it copies only the visible text. M-w has been remapped to a small wrapper for a while, mainly so that pressing it with no active region copies the current line. The new version forwards the prefix argument into a second branch: (defun my/kill-ring-save (beg end &optional copy-visible) "Save the region to the kill ring. With a prefix argument, copy only the visible text between BEG and END, skipping folded or hidden text, like `org-copy-visible'." (interactive (if (use-region-p) (list (region-beginning) (region-end) current-prefix-arg) (list (line-beginning-position) (line-beginning-position 2) current-prefix-arg))) (if copy-visible (org-copy-visible beg end) (kill-ring-save beg end))) [remap kill-ring-save] keeps M-w working everywhere. So why org-copy-visible?, I could have written my own invisible-text walker, but org-copy-visible already is one and it ships with Emacs!

what the fuck is going on with Dear Leader’s health?

submitted by /u/SorbettoAlcolico [link] [comments]

Try to guess which party he belongs to.  ( 55 min )

Even now, in our so-called postliterate age, can reading a book—a novel, of all things—inspire us to a richer, fuller life? Ayad Akhtar hopes it still can.  ( 100 min )

Today we’re listening to Egberto Gismonti, a Brazilian composer, guitarist, and pianist from Carmo.

Come with me now to Palo Alto. We’re hopping in the car to make the more than 30-mile drive south of San Francisco to the bucolic campus of Stanford University, where former NFL star Andrew Luck awaits us. The Stanford campus remains as gorgeous, and sheltered, as ever. This is the ideal setting for gifted minds to construct their own realities, and Luck remains one of the more gifted minds that the sport of football has ever produced. Smart enough to read the most complicated defenses at a glance, and smart enough to leave the NFL when he realized that the life of a pro quarterback was making both him, and his wife Nicole, miserable. You could argue that Andrew Luck was too smart for the NFL. But is he smart enough to turn Stanford football into a national powerhouse? That’s what I’m here…  ( 1 min )

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We don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But we know for a fact that today you can...  ( 9 min )

This is the weekly, free edition of The Backchannel. If you’d like to receive the free edition of The Backchannel...  ( 11 min )

Let’s take a moment to read some actual words posted on social media by the actual president of the United States of America. On Aug. 3, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been.” It’s an insult to fiction to call that fiction. I’m not sure what you call something more fabricated than fiction – maybe “ludicriction”? – but that’s what Trump’s words are. Trump has left reality behind and lives in a fantasy world of great polls As The New York Times recently reported, “The latest surveys indicate that Mr. Trump is now all but the most unpopular second-term president at this stage of their tenure in the history of polling going back to the 1940s. The only exception is not one that would give Mr. Tr…  ( 13 min )

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

With the midterm elections looming and Americans plagued by the cost of virtually everything, President Donald Trump decided it’s a great time for a trade war with Canada. You all know Canada, right? It’s the big place just north of us. Our close ally. The country known for being incredibly nice. That Canada. Trump slapped 50% U.S. tariffs on a number of Canadian goods after trade negotiations fell apart Aug. 22. Then, on Aug. 24, Trump posted additional threats on social media, saying he’ll double tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts from Canada and adding: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” If I didn’t know better, I’d say Trump is doing more than Democrats to guarantee a Republican electoral wipeout in the midterms. Trump's trade war with Canada will make the GOP's life more m…  ( 14 min )

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

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 )

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 )

Like most normal, well-adjusted men, I have spent every waking moment since Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened in theaters feeling apoplectically angry about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” I have rage-posted online, noting that by casting people who are different than me, the director ruined a beloved epic poem I never actually read. I have blamed wokeness for creating a world in which an ancient work of absolute fiction can be sullied by what I, making perfect sense, angrily claim to be historical inaccuracies.  Yet despite all my productive and intellectual online shouting, the movie has made $652 million worldwide since its July 17 release. And even more frustratingly, I’m still single. I'm mad that a fictional movie is historically inaccurate I struggle to understand these d…  ( 12 min )

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 )

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

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

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

It seems all I hear these days are complaints about President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. As a humble oil executive, looking out on the Pacific Ocean from the wrap-around porch of my third mansion, I find these complaints deeply offensive. Sure, the word “war” carries many negative connotations. But let’s look at the bottom line, which, in my case, is the oil industry’s bottom line. We’re doing great! Just look at this New York Times headline from July 31: “Iran War Drives Oil Profits to Highest Levels in Years.” Huzzah! ExxonMobil, Chevron are cashing in on the Iran war In its second-quarter earnings report released that same day, Chevron showed it made $12.1 billion between April and June, up from $2.5 billion over those same months last year. I asked the people who I pay to form a hu…  ( 16 min )

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

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

In the coming months, when you bite down on a government-subsidized burger made with meat of questionable origin, you’ll have Glorious Leader Donald J. Trump to thank. On Aug. 21, the president who loves to call other people communists enraged American cattle ranchers by announcing plans to “allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.” Trump posted news of the deal on social media, but of course gave no specific details about who the deal is with, where the meat is coming from or why he’s suddenly admitting that waiving tariffs will, in fact, lower prices for consumers. It’s a turducken of hypocrisy. Trump importing beef won't help America's…  ( 15 min )

As President Donald Trump’s folly of a war with Iran continues, it seems the whole thing has become a joke to him and his administration. On Sept. 2, Trump posted this on his Truth Social account: “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be 'hotter' than ever before!” What the hell are you doing, man? This is a war, not the "Washed-Up Reality Gameshow Star Comedy Hour." And maybe ask Americans struggling to afford gas and ground beef whether America is “hotter” than ever before.  Trump and his White House act like the Iran war is funny The official White House account on X quickly followed up, posting a fake map of the Middle East with the Strait of Hormuz labeled “Trump Strait,” which is a brain-mel…  ( 13 min )

By now you’ve likely heard of Natalie Harp, President Donald Trump’s executive assistant and personal ego-inflater, a 35-year-old loyalist who appears ever by the president’s side. She went from background character in the Trump administration to a national focal point in a blink after Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff spoke this line criticizing the president’s preoccupations and the luxury jet he was “gifted” by a foreign country: “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Questions swirled, and suddenly, Harp was everywhere. America learned how she carries a portable printer so she can show the president printouts of people saying nice things about him. We heard about the time she rode in the trunk…  ( 14 min )

If you’re a sane Republican – and yes, I do believe such people exist – the past week had to be monumentally embarrassing. President Donald Trump, who’s terrible at pretending to be a conservative, tried to bribe U.S. voters by saying every adult would receive a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans win the midterm elections. If it weren’t a complete con, that would cost about $1.3 trillion at a time when the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. So much for fiscal conservatism. A ludicrous and embarrassing GOP midterm convention The president made the embarrassing kickback offer Sept. 9 during an equally embarrassing Republican midterm convention that centered around idolatry of Trump. At the event in Dallas, he implored GOP voters: “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”  Does that make…  ( 15 min )

Why doesn’t he just get it over with already and change our country to the United States of Trump?  ( 57 min )

Who better to team up with for such a slimy crusade than Dr. Oz?  ( 60 min )

The president said he’s leading the world into a future of “super intelligence,” but it sure sounded like the opposite.  ( 62 min )

When we set out to do a supersized season of Normal Gossip, it was all tee-hee, ha ha, look at all these funny goofs we have! And then we went through The Process and made 12 actual episodes of silly, unhinged, or just plain weird stories. Now? We need a nap. Luckily for everyone, we saved the best for last! There was no way we were going to do a season of all-stars without bringing back our dowager queen, Kelsey McKinney! For our finale (for real this time), we brought Kelsey a story about a power struggle amongst the staff of a pediatrician's office, with grievances so petty and machinations so cursed that we actually had Kelsey sympathizing with management. (Possibly the first and last time that will ever happen.) If you’ve got feelings about plant parenthood, sound bowls, efficiency in the workplace, mysterious white powders, or the collective quest of office managers everywhere to get a five-star rating on the apps, this one is just for you. But if all you want is to listen to Rachelle and Kelsey laugh for an hour—hey, we’re not judging—we’ve got you covered there too!  ( 16 min )

Barstool Sports podcaster Ryen Russillo has an urgent message for you: He will be dead in 72 hours unless $12 million is wired to the following bank acc—sorry, my mistake. I just assumed that's what he was going to say based on the haunting thumbnail on this video. Now that I've played it, I see that Russillo is simply interested in selling you some appallingly lit food. https://twitter.com/TheRyenRussillo/status/2102566992217776535 The video appears to have been shot in a study room at the local library, and Russillo looks like he was told that recording this was the only way to ensure his family will be allowed to stay alive in West Germany. Did he film this thing by himself with an iPhone and a tripod? The abrupt cuts to stuttering first-person footage of troughs of bread and fries would seem to suggest so.  ( 15 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Giri answers a question about how to encourage your child to love your favorite sport.  ( 21 min )

In the grand scheme of things, Week 1 of the NFL season means nothing. There are still 16 games to go afterward, and a lot of teams use that first game as a kind of unofficial preseason game to iron out all of the kinks. After just one week, it wouldn’t be fair to make such grand pronouncements as, “The Falcons may never win another game,” or “Boy, the Lions are kinda fucked,” or “Justin Herbert has gone from overrated to just plain sucking ass.” But after two games? Well now, I think that’s a large enough sample size to make the kind of sweeping generalizations that make for good football radio. So that’s exactly what Arif Hasan and I do this week on All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/de74fc48-90f0-4703-b864-1530be9ac8bb  ( 17 min )

The Protect College Sports Act passed another procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, by a 70-21 margin. It will clear a few more procedural steps this week before going up for a final vote, at which point it is expected to pass and be sent to the House. In the meantime, it continues to mutate into a worse and more exploitative version of itself. More than 35 amendments were added to the PCSA yesterday, and one in particular stands out. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville amended the bill to sharpen its language on how NIL spending would interact with the proposed salary cap for players. The bill now explicitly states that vaguely defined NIL money earned by players would count against a given program's spending cap on players, which would be set at $48.8 million. https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/2102533363277910208  ( 19 min )

Ireland and Israel are, at least for now, set for some really weird soccer matches. Unfriendlies, you might say. Their national men’s teams have a home-and-home series scheduled to open this weekend, only there are no home games for either side. Both matches will be played in Central Europe: one in an empty stadium, the other with only Israeli fans. The top story in Ireland these days, sports or otherwise, is that the games will be played at all.   “I think we all agree we shouldn’t be in the position where we have to play the game,” John Martin, head of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), said last week.  And Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson said he’d personally polled all his players, and "none of us feel comfortable playing in these games."  ( 20 min )

Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.  Sisi, owned and operated by an Austrian company called Kora Yachts, is used for racing, her calendar divided between summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean, or what the rest of us know as "the life." In between all the racing, Sisi has to be delivered from port to port. To get to the starting mark of the Palermo–Montecarlo Regatta, she had to be sailed from the finishing mark of the Aegean600, in Sounion, Greece, to the port of Palermo. With roughly a month between the two races, Sisi's crew first delivered her to the top-of-the-line facilities at Marina Genova, adjacent to the…  ( 55 min )

I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write When you are the one who prompted the AI, the written output is often quite useful. But do not mistake this for effective writing. I am so tired of reading LLM-generated text, especially when it was prompted by someone else. ✍️ Reply by email

Josie (2017) The tension between writing things easily using a computer vs writing them in one of my lovely notebooks never subsides and it is crazy-making. Maybe there could be a document format that displays the author's (human-written) text, but has a hidden AI-generated version or summary. Sort of like how "Alt" text works for images. I'm so tired of reading LLM output, but future readers (and machines) could benefit from the tedious, exhaustive details. Just keep it out of my way until then. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

INSIDE: Rand Paul ... RFK Jr. ... Trent McCotter

he’s such a fucking embarrassment

Blame Natalie Harp. On Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, Donald Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House after whining for the umpteenth time about “Fake News,” his decade-long catchphrase to demonize accurate but unflattering press coverage. (It remains unclear if the president, whose paternal grandfather was from Germany, knows the term is an English translation of the infamous Nazi term “lügenpresse.”) Trump has been complaining about the media’s insufficient reverence for him throughout his entire political career, but there seems to be no precipitating cause for this particular tantrum. To the contrary, POLITICO reported that “senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.” “You get sick of it,” was all …  ( 7 min )

Recently, I needed to test a full build of my C networking library together with the C build toolchain under NetBSD. Everything is fine on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) and macOS—I just want to confirm it works on NetBSD as well. Why NetBSD? NetBSD is an open-source Unix-like operating system famous for its outstanding portability. It runs on an exceptionally wide range of hardware—from modern x86-64/aarch64 servers and desktops to embedded systems, handheld devices, vintage machines (such as VAX and m68k), and even some game consoles (see Platforms supported by NetBSD). Its long-standing motto is “Of course it runs NetBSD”. This makes sense if you want maximum portability. After all, it’s essentially good old 4.3BSD, which adds a nice touch of nostalgia. My home data center, as I call it, does not h…  ( 5 min )

Today we’re listening to Corntuth, an American ambient musician based in Brooklyn.

Dua Lipa is a British-Albanian singer and songwriter who became one of the biggest pop stars of her generation. Born  ( 5 min )

This is a major mode for editing sxhkdrc files. SXHKD is the Simple X Hot Key Daemon which is commonly used in minimalist desktop sessions on Xorg (I use it with bspwm, herbstluftwm, and i3wm). The sxhkdrc file configures key chords, binding them to commands. For the technicalities, read the man page sxhkd(1). Package name (GNU ELPA): sxhkdrc-mode Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/sxhkdrc-mode GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/sxhkdrc-mode Backronym: Such Xenotropic Hot Keys Demonstrate Robustness and Configurability … mode. 1.3.0 on 2026-09-23 This version makes quality-of-life refinements to an already stable package. Fontification of key chord chains Key chord chains are written with the semicolon (;) or colon (:) characters. The former refers to one-shot operations while the latter is for continuous ones that exit only with Escape. The corresponding faces are sxhkdrc-mode-chain-one-off-separator and sxhkdrc-mode-chain-continuous-separator. Support for all command prefixes The previous version only covered the ; in front of a command. The prefixes @ and ~ are now covered as well. They are all using teh face sxhkdrc-mode-command-prefix, which supersedes the deprecated sxhkdrc-mode-command-async. Continuation lines in commands are highlighted as well This concerns the backslash character (\) at the end of a line. The applicable face is sxhkdrc-mode-continuation-line. All modifiers are covered The updated manpage of SXHKD, sxhkd(1), mentions all the modifiers that it supports. I have extended support for all of them in the order they appear in the manual.  ( 1 min )

An investigation uncovered that Maine senator Susan Collins, among other politicians, have benefited from such lax enforcement.  ( 61 min )

And it’s not because the product in question is fertilizer.  ( 57 min )

I've been on my mac since early yesterday. I had planned to remain here indefinitely (long story), but don't think that's going to work. This started because i've been receiving a more-than-usual number of paper cuts on Linux for the past week. Things like Wi-Fi dropping out randomly, Espanso stops working, Syncthing conflicts, and other little glitches and oddities that had become noticeable enough to annoy me. Thing is, there are annoyances on the Mac, too. Spaces are unusable for me. Finder is still weak. SMB shares are slower and less reliable than a nice NFS share in fstab. Maybe the thing that bugs me most are the never-ending permissions dialogs. Coddle much? Anyway, I kept saying "Ugh!" often enough for a couple of days that I'm now back at the Linux machine. It's so odd to me that, when I logged in, I felt like, "Whew, that's a relief!". I never thought that could happen, but here we are. I'll probably waffle on this for as long as I use computers, so we'll see. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

A baseball season is very long and offers plenty of time for everyone involved to forget the stuff they would rather forget. For that reason among many others, it would make a great deal of sense to have long ago consigned Team USA's performance in March's World Baseball Classic to the ol' memory toilet. They were uniquely joyless in an event otherwise defined by goofball cheer; in place of the light nationalism that sets the WBC's otherwise highly variable stakes, Team USA was scowling, half-assed, and haplessly coppish. In a fun and loose exhibition event, Team USA alone dared to ask whether ballplayers too might not be a kind of special operations-style troop. Then they lost to Venezuela in the final, despite locker-room inspiration from one of the half-dozen or so SEAL-turned-influencer guys who claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden. Taken altogether, it was a perfect illustration of a certain American way of being in the world—the kind that makes an embarrassing scene at a jet-ski rental counter while wearing a Grunt Style T-shirt, a version of Uncle Sam that keeps the pointing finger but is also worryingly sunburnt and wearing blade-style sunglasses on the back of his head. But that was a long time ago, and a great deal of baseball has been played since. Enough baseball, in fact, that players like Paul Skenes are already giving retrospective interviews to their hometown papers about where things went wrong. The Pittsburgh Pirates were eliminated from playoff contention last weekend, despite a modest trade-deadline splurge aimed at shoring up what had been a terrible bullpen. There are things to be hopeful about in Pittsburgh, even in that bullpen, and also reasons for concern.  ( 20 min )

If José Mourinho bringing a printout of questionable fouls from the Madrid derby to a press conference was an objectively funny maneuver from the Special One, the resulting fallout is bewildering, convoluted, and a little bit pathetic from everyone involved. It seems that Mourinho's actions did what he meant them to do: They grabbed the attention of La Liga. Mourinho, however, may not have wanted the attention specifically of league president Javier Tebas. Tebas, who grew up a Real Madrid fan but who has turned out to be a thorn in the club's side, has never been one to keep his opinions to himself, whether that's about racism in Spanish soccer or about FIFA president Gianni Infantino. On that note, bright and early on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Spain time, Tebas decided to drop a response…  ( 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 about flawed domes, office condiments, life on one leg, and more. Your letters: Baron:  ( 38 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I were joined by returning champion Eamon Whalen. Eamon just published a big profile of Nick Shirley in New York magazine, and we spent the first half of the show talking about the particulars of the story, the broader implications of letting 24-year-old prank YouTubers dictate policy decisions, and the uncomfortable position people like Shirley put supposed right-wing intellectuals like Chris Rufo into. We then transitioned into some Minnesota Timberwolves chat, with particular attention paid to the bizarre robot-driven ghost kitchens Marc Lore is investing in now that he's pumped and dumped an NBA franchise. This was a fun one! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 15 min )

Adam Wingard opens his new movie, Onslaught, with a brainrot history of the military industrial complex, a slipshod compilation of combat footage, political speechmaking, and behind-the-headlines conspiracizing that (semi-)convincingly situates the origins of the American century in Operation Paperclip and the importation of Nazi scientists at the end of the Second World War. It rules. Set to a pounding synth score and employing the kind of queasily associative quick-cuts that would make even a 9/11 truther blush, this sequence anticipates something hard-hitting and sharp-edged, the sort of action movie that weaponizes its gristly bad taste for subversive means. I wish I could see the movie that this credit sequence foretells. Instead, I saw Onslaught. The set-up is blessedly simple: Celes…  ( 26 min )

The Detroit Tigers announced Monday that their ballpark will henceforth and forever, or until the naming-rights deal runs out or some more banks merge, be known as Fifth Third Park. "When you look around, it's so much more than where the Tigers play baseball," Ryan Gustafson, CEO of Ilitch Sports and Entertainment, said at the unveiling. So much more. It's not merely a "Tiger" "stadium." It's Fifth Third Park. Fifth Third! Ol' One and Two-Thirds Field. The Fraction. Hey, you wanna catch a game down at The 1.6̅? Tigers fans surely can't wait to embrace the new name for what used to be Comerica Park, which opened in 2000 but never truly felt like home because they could pronounce it without difficulty. Comerica was purchased by Fifth Third earlier this year, and now the branding has been set to rights. "Many names were recommended to us by customers and citizens here in Detroit," said Tim Spence, chairman, CEO, and president of Fifth Third, and all of them were presumably ignored in favor of Fifth Third Park.  ( 17 min )

When I called up my grandfather Irwin Miller last fall, I asked him if he felt his age. “Uh, no, probably 94,” he said, laughing as he shaved off three years. “The body feels 97, the head doesn’t, thank goodness—I think my memory’s pretty good.” I call my grandfather Papa, and his memory was more than pretty good considering he was born before the Great Depression. Last November, I wanted to ask him about a big moment in his life: the year he graduated from his New Orleans high school and set out on his own. “Growing up in Louisiana, LSU was the only college I thought about,” he told me. His first day was unceremonious: “My folks drove me to Baton Rouge, they dropped me off and said, ‘Good luck and goodbye.’ That was the way things were in those days.”  ( 49 min )

error fetching full text: Reqwest client error: error decoding response body  ( 1 min )

Quick: name the best croissant filling. If you’re a basic American like me, you only encounter basic croissant flavors: chocolate, almond, and ham and cheese. These are the norm, and they do the job well if you’re hungry and want to feel 10% more French. But surely, you’ve thought, there must be room for more fillings than that in the American croissant repertoire. Surely there must be a, like, fourth thing we can put into one.  Reader, I’m pleased to report that I have found one such worthy croissant filling, and it’s nothing you’d guess off the top of your head. But take one bite of it, and you’ll know I’m right.  The croissant in question is dubbed “brown butter cornmeal twice-baked,” and the bakery that sells it is San Francisco’s Butter & Crumble, owned by chef and self-dubbed “girl…  ( 1 min )

Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Susan Collins ... Don Jr. ... Natalie Harp

who knew that doing the right thing could feel so good?

Fat Bear Week – a tradition unlike any other – has arrived, just in time to raise the spirits of Americans plague by high grocery prices and the exorbitant cost of beef. I’m not sure why I mentioned beef there. It’s just that it’s really expensive right now, hitting $7.16 a pound in August. And we’ve apparently got these fat bears that aren’t doing much and … You know what, never mind. This year marks the 12th time that the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska has hosted its chunky bear competition, a wildly popular online contest to pick which brown bear does the best job fattening itself up before hibernating.  Gee, those Fat Bear Week bears look delicious Park Superintendent Mark Sturm said in a statement: “A new generation of fat bears is taking shape, and they’re off to a stro…  ( 14 min )

Today’s mix opens with new ambient music by Hayes Bradley, Asio Silver, and The Black Dog.

Before Waitress! became the name of a completely different and much more famous movie, there was this wonderfully strange 1981  ( 9 min )

Another month, another agent-shell update. If you missed the last post, have a look at the 0.73 update. As usual, this post showcases highlights, but please check out the full list of changes if you're after the nitty-gritty. What's agent-shell? agent-shell is a native Emacs mode to interact with AI agents powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol). New supported agents Two agents join the family, available as usual via M-x agent-shell, or explicitly as follows: Antigravity (Google), #795 by @tychoish. Start it with M-x agent-shell-start-antigravity-agent. Qoder CLI, #831 by @unship. Start it with M-x agent-shell-start-qoder-agent. Prompt any time Likely the most impactful feature in the release. It's highly discoverable and plenty useful, so I'm expecting a fair amount of uptake. A typical sh…  ( 7 min )

In keeping with this blog’s recent interest in building REST clients in Emacs Lisp (Elisp), here’s a utility library I’ve assembled that covers some common tasks in doing so. I’ve named this package restlib (https://github.com/kickingvegas/restlib) and it is now available on MELPA. restlib is organized into the following three sections: Network (HTTP) requests URL components JSON processing Further reading about these sections can be found in the restlib API Reference. To get an idea of what you can do with restlib, explore the source code for a lightweight weather lookup client using https://wttr.in called wttr.el. Anecdotally, I’ve already created a number of internal REST clients using restlib, some of which I plan to publish on MELPA in the near future. As restlib is early in its development, there is always room for improvement. If you have any suggestions for improving restlib, feel free to submit an issue.  ( 1 min )

As I’ve mentioned many times, I am a heavy Magit user. Pretty often I do code reviews from within Magit. There was one thing that has bothered me for a long time.  ( 1 min )

typewriter mode in the Fun category, but people might actually find the constraints useful for focused writing. Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Sep 26 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Sep 30 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 1 0100 Asia/Singapore EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316464079/ Thu Oct 1 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/UTC – Fri …  ( 3 min )

You guys remember back when Donald Trump and his Republican Party promised that, if elected, they would clean and regrout the granite at the White House’s north entrance and provide Americans with endless artificial intelligence slop on social media? Remember when they swore that, on day one, they would rant about “fake polls” and arbitrarily change the names of large bodies of water?  Yeah, I don’t remember that, either. What I recall hearing were promises to lower food and gas prices and usher in an economic Golden Age, along with a guarantee that Trump was “not going to start a war.” Oops. The actual promises Trump and Republican lawmakers made haven’t panned out. At all. So now they have nothing to share with the American public beyond the grout and the growling and whatever fake conte…  ( 15 min )

I was working on putting our youngest child up for adoption and draining my retirement account so we could afford potentially tainted ground beef when I learned the joyous news: AMERICA IS GETTING ITS BALLROOM! On Aug. 31, the U.S. Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump the green light to continue construction of the $400 million White House ballroom, a guaranteed morale boost for struggling Americans who value unnecessary government grandeur over food. Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social: “I am pleased to report that the United States Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of the Ballroom/Military Complex being built without any further contingency, doubt, or threat. We are living in the Golden Age of America, and this Building will be one of the Greatest ever constructed in Was…  ( 14 min )

Gas costs about $4.50 per gallon and Americans are struggling to afford meat, so it’s good to see President Donald Trump laser-focused on … wait for it … banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House because they hurt his precious feelings. That should solve our affordability crisis! The news outlets’ crime was accurately reporting the news, none of which is good for Trump, as his approval rating in one poll released Sept. 21 dropped below 30% for the first time. Trump can’t face the fact that Americans are mad because their president got us into an intractable war with Iran that spiked fuel prices, and because food prices make trips to the grocery store painful, and because that same president seems to only care about building ballrooms and arches and slapping his name on building…  ( 14 min )

You have heard about the two Anthropic employees who, this week, publicly informed America that artificial intelligence could eradicate the whole of humanity within a decade, which is less time than it takes for your average Seamless order to arrive. If these gentlemen, Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, are correct in their assessment, the beginning of our destruction may well have commenced a month ago right here in San Francisco. The first shot fired in this looming war happened at a seemingly innocuous Cow Hollow storefront known as Andon Market. Back in August, Luna, the AI bot that serves as that store’s manager, fired one of its own employees. The employee in question was dinged by their virtual boss for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks…  ( 1 min )

Republicans have a whopping financial advantage, thanks in part to the We-Invented-New-Money crowd. Is that enough to overcome affiliation with an extremely unpopular president?  ( 65 min )

Greedy slicksters are scooping up farms and doctor’s offices and ruining them for profit. Only in America!  ( 63 min )

This past weekend, Ed Sheeran performed his first concert since decrepit Patriots owner Robert Kraft stuck his hand up the singer's ass and made him respect Israel. The culturally Irish but politically English musician played with no openers and a new backing band Saturday night in Philadelphia, because all his previous supporting acts abandoned him after his craven decision to drop pro-Palestine rapper Macklemore from his U.S. tour, at the behest of Kraft and other NFL stadium owners. During Saturday's show, Sheeran read a prepared statement presented as an apology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInyzsqLvKg Sheeran delivered everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating, meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else. A partial transcript:  ( 18 min )

Gable Steveson, the hottest UFC prospect in years, who arrived at the promotion with a past marked by a sexual assault allegation, got knocked out by a nobody in 12 seconds on Saturday in Los Angeles. Dana White sure knows how to pick ‘em. Steveson, an NCAA legend and Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, was given a slot on the main card in just his second UFC fight. That fast-tracking now looks absolutely foolish. Mere moments into the fight, Steveson walked into a straight right hand to the chin from Sean Sharaf, previously winless as a UFC heavyweight, which was followed instantly by a nuclear left hook to the jaw. The precise and savage 1-2 left Steveson unconscious before he hit the mat. Steveson seemed on the verge of adopting the fencing response on the canvas before referee Frank Trigg jumped in to protect him. Steveson’s night, and his status as White's chosen one, were done.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4heWhQrQb4Y  ( 17 min )

On July 13, California state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that he would lead a 12-state coalition in mounting a supposedly bold legal challenge to the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery mega-merger. The deal had cleared every previous legal hurdle, but the states had to try and stop the Ellison family from gaining control over the plurality of American media production because, in Bonta's words, that consolidation would represent a "death knell for the film and TV industry—and for our democracy." Two months later, the parties have settled the suit, with the states meekly submitting and getting nothing serious to show for it. What a waste of time. After a nine-month campaign, the Ellisons have won the right to dictate the future of American entertainment and media. It all began in December 2025, when Netflix agreed to pay WBD $72 billion in cash and stock for the latter's streaming and film-studio businesses. When WBD rejected Paramount's competing all-cash offer for everything it had, adding the TV arm to the assets in the Netflix deal, Paramount mounted a hostile takeover bid. The Ellisons' ominous pitch to WBD shareholders was: You better take our deal or our friend the President will reject your merger. It worked. When the WBD board offered Netflix a chance to match Paramount's offer, the streaming giant instantly said no, and David Ellison had his prize. All he needed to do was jump over a few regulatory hurdles, most of which have been lowered or removed for people like him under the second Trump Administration. The Department of Justice approved the deal in June.  ( 17 min )

Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veterans, including Díaz and the dreaded C.B. Bucknor, raised their hands. Bucknor is already missing from the sport, having absorbed a deflected Jacob Misiorowski heater with his face mask back in May, and has not returned since. Díaz, meanwhile, has had the summer to make a farewell tour and reflect on his time in the game. His conclusion, per an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today: Baseball stinks now. Díaz will not miss it. "There’s just so much scrutiny and negative stuff now," Díaz said. "There are a lot of peo…  ( 23 min )

Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor handiwork. But other times, if you're both stubborn and resourceful enough, you can get yourself out of whatever jam a shit recipe has put you in. I have one such story for you. The recipe in question was for a chocolate cream pie, which I will not link to here because it's a failed recipe. We were having my wife's parents over for dinner last night to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday. The plan was to make a key lime pie for dessert, which would be no trouble at all. I use a recipe for key lime that I found online that never fails. Plus, we already had a ready-made graham cracker pie crust on hand for it. Bingo bango, one pie down. But my wife had also grabbed a ready-made chocolate pie crust at the store, and I had no go-to recipe to use with that one. So I did a lazy search and found a chocolate cream pie recipe that looked simple enough. All I had to do was beat a few ingredients together over a stovetop, pour it into the shell, stick it in the fridge, and that was it.  ( 16 min )

For all of his flaws as a manager, and there are plenty, José Mourinho always provides clubs the full José Mourinho Experience. The Special One instantly becomes the center of attention wherever he goes, no matter the circumstances, and while that might overshadow his players, it also puts all of the spotlight and the pressure on the manager. In the past, this has been an issue as Mourinho gets carried away with playing up the gimmick, but for a club like 2026–27 Real Madrid, coming off of a season in which two of its players fought and one of them was FORGETTING THINGS, perhaps Mourinho's gravitational pull is exactly what it needed. Take, for example, Sunday's derby between Madrids Real and Atlético, a 2-1 win for the latter at the Metropolitano over the 10-man visitors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLzrK9H8XLc  ( 23 min )

It is generally agreed that the Miami Dolphins are the worst team in professional football not named the Ottawa Redblacks. In fairness, the Dolphins could go 0-13 in the NFL, just like the Redblacks have in Canada, based on all the things they have not done, are not doing, and will not do between now and Thanksgiving. Everyone agreed when the season began that the Dolphins were going to stink to high heaven, so we can move off them. Indeed, losing in Week 1 to the Raiders did not elevate Las Vegas in the football speaking world because the same logic was applied to the Dolphins that is typically applied to teams beating the Raiders: Well, it's the Raiders. What else would you expect? Well, now we're stuck with wondering if the Raiders are actually cured of their Raiderhood because after whomping the miserable Dolphins, they whomped the Los Angeles Chargers Sunday by nearly the same score, and we are confronted by one of two choices—we are finally wrong about the Raiders for the first time since Jon Gruden was fired, which we refuse to accept, or the Chargers are as god-awful as the Dolphins are and as such could be as bad as the Redblacks, too. And the jury is feverishly deliberating that even as we speak.  ( 17 min )

Have a seat and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 13 min )

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people shared on Twitter and in this announcement blog. What I do know from experience is that none of this would have been possible without Jasper Wang. Readers will know him from his annual financial report blogs, but it cannot be overstated how much this company owes to his steady hand, his pragmatism, and his extremely smart brain. I knew that Jasper had a successful career in corporate consulting, and that when Deadspin imploded, he reached out to a few newly unemployed writers to buy them a beer and see if there was anything he could do to help. I knew that awkward first date led to more conversations and, a year later, the launch of this experiment that somehow has continued to exist for six years. Despite having worked with Jasper for five years, I had never talked to him about how he made the decision to walk away from a high-paying salary and take the risk of a new business with a bunch of bloggers. Once I decided that this season's theme would be focusing on can't-turn-back moments, I knew Jasper had to be a guest.  ( 16 min )

It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miéville’s writing incorporates all manner of historical and linguistic snags, at once erudite and irreverent, challenging but inviting. A Miéville novel or story collection is like a rabbit hole, prompting the reader down stray paths of unexpected inquiry and discovery. It’s never a bad idea to read one of his novels with a dictionary nearby, not because his work is abstruse or opaque, but because, in order to fully step into the worlds Miéville creates, one has to learn a slightly new language. This is, in fact, a microco…  ( 61 min )

Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into DraftKings. The upshot of the investigation is that this obviously exploitative and profit-driven company exploits its customers in the pursuit of profit in all the ways that you might have feared. The story features on-the-record testimony from former DraftKings employees who say that the company not only built tools to identify customers who are most likely to lose and entice them to keep betting, but also shut down projects that could have helped the company identify potential problem gamblers more easily. One source, a former data analyst named Jayden Butts, told the Times that he was tasked with testing a machine learning model that was able to not only identify which customers were most likely to be convinced to gamble with promotions and free bets, but target those most likely to lose those bets. From the Times: The core question was, “Is this person going to give us more than we’re giving them?” Mr. Butts said. “And if the answer is yes, open the floodgates.” [...] Data scientists had trained the new casino model on historical data. It was Mr. Butts’s job to test it on real customers. Each week, the model vacuumed up information about a user’s recent activity. The score it calculated was known internally as “elasticity,” a term borrowed from economics. Users with below-average scores were deemed “inelastic” and marked for fewer incentives. The “elastic” bettors remained. Two other former employees told the Times that when they raised concerns that customer-targeting initiatives like the one Butts worked on could potentially exploit problem gamblers, they were told not to put any protections in place.  ( 19 min )

One of the key arguments for a great power — other than the great power itself wanting to be one...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Don Jr. ... Umar Kremlev

I’ll tell you what We the People do need.

Surfer and stumbler (2026) I'm not sure if "Reduce & Simplify" means Emacs with a browser and file manager on Linux, or macOS with the default apps. I am fully on Linux now, but I keep side-eyeing the MacBook Air as if it will somehow rescue me. Honestly, I'm burning out on computers and software. I'm addicted to farting around with things. I spent the weekend installing and using Lotus Agenda from, like, 1990. For a minute I considered trying to use it exclusively as my task/project manager for a month. I mean, it's cool and retro, but seriously? It's a terrible idea that swallowed a good bit of my weekend. Today I woke up and dreaded opening Emacs. My whole life has been in Emacs for years and today I thought maybe I no longer wanted it there. I'm typing this in Emacs in a Markdown file …  ( 2 min )

All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.  This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks …  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Joel Noct Brinson, an American ambient musician based in Portland, Oregon.

Two of the biggest rock songs of the 1980s. Two enormous choruses. Two songs that can instantly transport you  ( 11 min )

I’m still getting used to the Glove80. Writing text is doable but still painfully slow. I mentioned I use tangent, which integrates the Glove80 layout. One thing it doesn’t have though is a practice layer for Emacs, with Emacs key chords like C-c C-z, for example. So I called Claude for help. I’m on the third version of this mod, adding the command names from Emacs, so that I know what the commands I’m retraining my fingers on are — because my fingers remembered these commands (and thus are now clueless), and now I need to commit them to memory again through my eyes. This here is the first post written fully with the Glove80. I’m getting there.  ( 2 min )

Graphviz, which I always seem to end up using. It’s powerful and not too hard to use but I don’t use it enough to internalize its syntax. So I’m always on the lookout for a better way. I’ve tried a bunch of them but I always go back to Graphviz. I just saw this video by Skybert Hacks (Torstein Krause Johansen) about using D2 for this very problem. Its syntax seems reminiscent of Graphviz but a little simpler and easier to remember. It integrates beautifully with Org-mode so it’s just perfect for writing reports, papers, notes, or blog posts. D2 produces nice diagrams—see the Skybert Hacks’ video for some examples—and is worth trying out. I’m going to do just that the next time I need to embed some videos in one of my documents. I just saw the video so I’m not familiar with the ins and outs of the app yet but it seems worth a little effort to learn. Once I try it out, I’ll report back and let you know how it worked out.  ( 5 min )

If you found yourself tuning in late for Sunday's matchup between the Eagles and Titans in Nashville, you may have had a number of burning questions: Has Jalen Hurts been replaced with sack of flour? Is Cam Ward the truth? Why is my television showing me slow motion replays of someone getting their feet hosed down? https://twitter.com/NFLonFOX/status/2101736833084428667?s=20 The heat was a problem for the Titans, as temperatures in Nashville hit the mid-90s and the region was under a heat advisory, with meteorologists citing a heat index up to 108 degrees. Fox's game crew reported that the turf at Nissan Stadium reached 157 degrees in the third quarter.  ( 16 min )

Caleb Williams was going to score a touchdown. Anyone watching from home, or inside of a thoroughly drenched Soldier Field, knew it was about to happen. The Chicago Bears were trailing Minnesota by an ugly score of 6-3 in the fourth quarter when Williams, boxed in all game by the Vikings’ defense, faked an outside zone handoff to running back Kyle Monangai and booted out to his left. The Vikings bit, and Williams found himself with a relatively easy scamper to the end zone ahead of him when he was suddenly and out of nowhere struck him down on the sodden turf: https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mvxx2jsrc22s As of this writing, Williams is reported to have suffered a hamstring injury. If that’s the case, it appears to be pretty bad. Not only was Williams screaming in agony for an extended period after going down, he was seen crying hard tears on his cart ride back to the locker room. Those were not, "aw gee I’m gonna miss a couple of games" tears. Those were "Fuck my season might be over," tears. Awful. Shitty. Unfair.  ( 15 min )

The beauty of college football is that there are so many teams, and so many bad coaches, that inevitably, a play that would otherwise have a one in a billion chance of happening actually has quite a good chance of turning into reality. For proof let’s go to Nashville, where the NC State Wolfpack committed an all-time boner yesterday. Roll the tape: https://bsky.app/profile/sickoscommittee.org/post/3mvvj7uilus2r A bit of background. The Wolfpack led Vanderbilt 24-7 at one point in the third quarter of this game, only for Commodores quarterback Jared Curtis to stage a furious rally that brought his team back within a field goal. There was just over a minute left on the clock when Curtis had first down at the NC State 16. Vandy had never led in this game, but it sure as shit looked like they were about to go up when WHOOP DEE!, Curtis threw a pass that Wolfpack safety Brody Barnhardt picked off at the two-yard line. Comeback bid sniffed out. Game over.  ( 18 min )

I guess the addled corpus of Lee Corso was the only thing keeping ESPN’s college football arm from shedding every last trace of dignity. Because if you tuned into the four-letter network's College GameDay program yesterday morning, you were treated to this profoundly nauseating minute of unwanted jingoism: https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mvurjqbakl2h That’s human malware Pat McAfee, Corso’s ostensible replacement on the GameDay set, giving the HOO BABY to our troops while his colleagues mindlessly chuckle in assent. This latest offense comes a mere week after the show invited universally despised Senator Ted Cruz onto its live broadcast from Austin, in which GameDay host Rece Davis allowed the Texas republican to shill for the odious Protect College Sports Act, and offered zero pushback on Cruz in doing so.  ( 19 min )

I’ll give you one guess

In native gardening, the most effective way to prevent unwanted plants (aka weeds) from growing is to crowd them out with plants you do want. Rather than well-space plants with large gaps of mulch, you packed plants densely together, just like you’d find in nature. Without the space to take root, weeds are (mostly) kept at bay. This is a metaphor about life and social change. I spend a lot of time fighting against social injustice.  ( 20 min )

With measles cases on the rise and midterm elections approaching, I’m sure the Republican Party is thrilled to see Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showing his true anti-vaccine-kook colors. Kennedy was the keynote speaker Sept. 17 at a convention held by the inaccurately named Children’s Health Defense, a rabidly anti-vaccine, pro-nonsense group Kennedy founded long before President Donald Trump put one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists in charge of America’s health. As the chief of the HHS, Kennedy has largely stayed away from the group and tried, reportedly under some pressure from the White House, to cool his opposition to proven medical facts. But in his keynote speech, delivered as the nearly 3,500 measles cases this year are already at a 35-year h…  ( 14 min )

Tri-X and two Leicas (2016) - Nikon F3 On most days I start a new daily note here, first thing in the morning, just in case there's something I want to write. I usually end up writing a sentence or two and that's it. Is it even worth the trouble? Why am I always in such a hurry even though I'm not actually going anywhere? ✍️ Reply by email

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | September 20, 2026  ( 9 min )

Imagine walking into a medieval courtroom and discovering that the defendant isn’t a criminal, a thief, or a murderer.  ( 10 min )

This package provides a global minor mode to increase the spacing/padding of Emacs windows and frames. The idea is to make editing and reading feel more comfortable. Enable the mode with M-x spacious-padding-mode. Adjust the exact spacing values by modifying the user option spacious-padding-widths. Package name (GNU ELPA): spacious-padding Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/spacious-padding Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/spacious-padding Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/spacious-padding GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/spacious-padding Sample images: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-06-03-emacs-spacious-padding/ https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-11-15-spacious-padding-extra-ui-dev/ Backronyms: Space Perception Adjusted Consistently Impacts Overall Usability State … padding; Spacious … Precise Adjustments to Desktop Divider Internals Neatly Generated. Version 0.9.0 on 2026-09-20 This is a small version that addresses a minor inconvenience with the Emacs daemon process reporting an unspecified-bg under certain circumstances. The workaround I defined ensures that we always use a known colour value. Other than that, the margin face, which was introduced in Emacs version 31, is also handled by spacious-padding-mode.  ( 1 min )

some additional thoughts on Markdown. A year ago he wrote a post complaining about the ankle biters who claim you can’t do serious writing with Markdown. I responded positively to his post and noted that even though I’m all in on Org mode and use it for virtually everything I write—even iMessages through the wonderful emacs-everywhere—it’s not really a good solution unless you’re using Emacs (although some people like Karl Voit disagree). These days, Martin is an Emacs user and does use Org mode a lot but he still prefers to write his documentation and prose in Markdown. The reason for that is partly that he’s used to it but also because he has tools to work with it and—at least in the case of documentation—has to worry about collaboration. It’s hard to disagree with anything he says although, again, Karl Voit strongly disagrees with the assertion that neither is better than the other, even when considered solely as markup languages. Even Martin appears to agree that Org is the better tool when you can consider its normal environment. As for the original question that got all this started, of course Markdown or Org mode can be used for serious writing as plenty of writers demonstrate everyday. It’s only the ankle biters—probably the same ones who claim em-dashes are used only by AIs—who say otherwise.  ( 5 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 role:maintainer  ( 2 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 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 )

If you’re wondering whether there are any good people remaining in the tech sector, or in this country’s ruling class in general, you’d be hard pressed to find a better case study than Craig Newmark. Newmark founded Craigslist.org in San Francisco way back in 1996 and became the sort of accidental billionaire that the early dot-com boom cranked out with seeming regularity. Some of those billionaires went on to become evil (Mark Zuckerberg), and some of them ended up merely becoming rich loud guys (Mark Cuban). Newmark, who ceded his CEO duties at Craigslist shortly after its founding, has endeavored to keep a lower profile, and a lower net worth, than any of them. To wit: Newmark no longer works with Craigslist at all, and spends the bulk of his time tending to various philanthropic endea…  ( 1 min )

Veteran couch potatoes know that Apple TV is currently the best streaming service. Netflix is a year away from casting Tilly Norwood in every series. HBO Max is still being run by a slash-and-burn expert whose sense of the zeitgeist is stuck somewhere around 1990. And Paramount+ is populated almost exclusively by 44-minute pickup ads. I can’t count on any of the aforementioned streamers to actually care about my needs as an educated viewer. Apple TV, for whatever reason, does.  It knows that I want a disheveled Gary Oldman dishing out vicious burns to all of the young’uns forced to work for him. It gives “Severance” creator Dan Erickson as long of a hiatus as he needs — and it’s always a long one — to make every season of his show unbearably suspenseful from wire to wire. And Apple knows …  ( 1 min )

This story was originally published on Defector, an independent employee-owned media company and another of Drew’s employers. Subscribe at Defector. Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far at Defector. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Your 2025 record: 12-5. You wanna get to the part about the owner being too horny for the law, so I’ll blow through this section as fast as is responsible. The 2025 49ers were a shining example of how a football team can prosper in the face of adversity. And by “adversity,” I mean half its roster tearing a ACL, its highest paid receiver…  ( 1 min )

Like most Americans enduring the horrors of everyday existence, I’ve been eagerly awaiting an uprising by nonhuman creatures.  Well, great news. The uprising is upon us, and the creatures are beavers! A string of beaver attacks in Maryland – a state not known for beaver-on-human violence – has put swimmers and boaters on notice and shown the rest of America what the future holds. Beavers, beavers everywhere. The revolution has begun. Since July 26, the state has endured three beaver attacks. Also, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, “a group that was canoeing reported a beaver attempting to charge one of their boats.” Clearly, the beavers were inspired by the military prowess of Iberian orca whales that for years have been ramming boats in the Strait of Gibraltar. A…  ( 13 min )

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

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

When I learned a data center was being built near my town or city, I stood up on my human chair and cheered. “At last,” I shouted, gleefully, “I will have data nearby. In a center. Which is definitely a good thing!” I love data. And I love centers. What could be better? Unlike the majority of Americans, I think the rapid expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing, and this is my honest opinion and not something I was paid to write with help from an AI chatbot. Thank you! Trump loves AI data centers, so they must be good! First off, we know data centers are great because our U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, has said so, calling them “big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built.” Are you telling me you don’t want a strong,…  ( 15 min )

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

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

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

Columnist Rex Huppke hopped on the latest (alleged) Gen Z trend: Pheromone-maxxing.  ( 8 min )

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

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 )

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

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

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 )

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

A proper title for the Republican Party’s two-day midterm convention, which begins Sept. 9 in Dallas, is: “We’ve performed terribly and made your lives worse. Please clap!” It’s an odd political move for the GOP. When you don’t have wins to celebrate, why seek out the spotlight? And why attend a gathering that has the wildly unpopular President Donald Trump front and center, further linking your party’s midterm election candidates to him? In a statement, Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said: “President Donald Trump and Republicans have delivered historic results for the American people, and every hour of this historic convention will tell that story.” Every hour may tell that story, but that story is a complete fiction, something viewers bored enough to tune into the eve…  ( 15 min )

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on American imports have now kicked in and, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I’m rooting for our neighbors to the north in this insipid trade war our president started. The reason is simple. Prime Minister Mark Carney and the staggeringly high percentage of Canadian people who support him in standing up to President Donald Trump’s unprovoked hostility are doing what all Americans should be doing. They’re looking at this administration, recognizing Trump is nuts and saying, emphatically: “We’re not going to put up with that.” Canadians are confronting the reality of an obviously unhinged president better than the Republican Party, about 30% of Americans and a shockingly large swath of U.S. news organizations. Canadians know Trump is nuts, so their prime mini…  ( 14 min )

Pretty much all the time lately. ✍️ Reply by email

Trimline rotary (2016) Came pretty close this morning to setting up a Gemini server. That's not something I need right now. If I were to set one up, I'd probably start with Brennan's Creating a Blog in Gemini:// Are we ever going to tire of navel-gazing about algorithms and attention and "kids these days!". I hope so, because I'm tired of it. ✍️ Reply by email

Today, I realized that running my own business (successfully for a while) is a big part of what made me hate capitalism so damn much. For nearly a decade, I grew a blog I started while learning to code into a tech education business and dev consultancy. First it was a hobby, then a side hustle, then a full time job. I loved having control of my work and my time.  ( 21 min )

God lowers prices, Donny airs his vices, and so much more...

submitted by /u/Kirikomori [link] [comments]

The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” is one of the defining songs of early-1980s synth-pop, a dramatic, catchy and  ( 5 min )

In my last blogpost, I showcased how I review tasks finished over the last seven days. It implicitly assumes that I attend every group meeting[1] and that the group meeting happens during the same time every week[2]. In a more practical sense, it would be nice to generalize this workflow. I would like to specify a date, since when completed tasks would be displayed until the current day. This way I would be able to review my finished agenda items since a particular day in the past. This date would typically be when the group meeting last occured, but we are not strictly bound to it. Implementation in emacs lisp We write an elisp snippet similar to the one in the previous blogpost. (defvar pani/last-group-meeting-date nil) (setq org-agenda-custom-commands '(("v" "Finished tasks since…  ( 2 min )

improving Emacs performance on files with long lines. As those of you who have to deal with long lines know, Emacs doesn’t handle them very well and is prone to freeze while trying to render them. One good solution for this is Phil Sainty’s excellent so-long package. The idea is that so-long detects when when Emacs is dealing with long lines and turns off certain computationally expensive features such as syntax highlighting and font-lock mode. This is a big help in speeding up Emacs’ processing of long lines but it also disables some useful features. Cherti’s idea to to provide more granular control. For example, while syntax highlight does impose a processing penalty, it also makes code easier to read for many people. Cherti shows how to get so-long to not disable syntax highlighting. Cherti examines several other features that can be disabled, or not, by so-long and discusses the pros and cons of doing so. He shows you how, in effect, to fine tune so-long to achieve your desired balance between performance and utility. I really like this story because it’s a perfect example of how Emacs makes it easy to solve problems. First, there was the problem of Emacs freezing when dealing with long lines. Phil Sainty, who is not a member of the Emacs development team, helped ameliorate that problem with a third party package. Then James Cherti noticed that in certain situations you might want a less drastic effect than the default so-long action and showed how to achieve that. Even Cherti’s suggestions can be customized to suit the individual user. It’s Emacs at its best.  ( 5 min )

Remind me why we gave this moron carte blanche to let his freak flag fly?  ( 80 min )

I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls,...  ( 7 min )

The fourth season of Amazon's Reacher, which was based on Lee Child's book Gone Tomorrow and set largely in Philadelphia, came to a close earlier this week. Defector's elite Reacher Creature team was convened to discuss this unusually brutal and mostly quite good season of the show; you can find our discussions of previous seasons here and here. The post contains a bunch of spoilers. David: Reacher Creatures, how are we recovering from Reacher Season 4: Showdown At Hoagie Junction? I assume we are all leaving the hospital against medical advice after sustaining thousands of brutal wounds from a bladed weapon, tearing a wan cheesesteak in half on the subway to share with those in need, things of that nature? Brandy: After having a not great time with Season 3, for various reasons, I was thrilled to discover my love of Reacher was able to make a similarly miraculous recovery.  ( 37 min )

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: Sometime between showing college football's highest-rated games of all time, ESPN thought it necessary to bonk viewers over the head with fear-mongering over the sport on behalf of the Protect College Sports Act. We've written about it already, and it is all the talk in college sports: ESPN debased itself by putting Senator Ted Cruz on a television set—right where people can see him!—and teeing him up to shill shamelessly and shamefully on behalf of this bill. A bill, not to overdo it, that is not only being championed by the Nick Sabans and the Ted Cruzes of the world, but by President Donald Trump, a large number of athletic conference presidents and university presidents, and corporations like Disney. Given all that, you won't be surprised that the bill is completely anti-labor. It is a bill that seeks to undo the last few years of college athletes grabbing some of the fruits of their labor and put the genie back into its bottle as much as possible, and to reinstall the NCAA atop college sports by federal law. And ESPN, which is now purely just a promotion arm for the many leagues it's in business with, is more than happy to pitch in. The cartel is striking back and hoping enough people are dumb enough, or just spiteful enough, to restore control to the parties whose wild selfishness led to amateurism's collapse.  ( 33 min )

Alexander Ovechkin is probably the single most famous Russian athlete. He is also a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not a particularly quiet or passive one. This, occasionally, has gotten him into some hot water with the rest of the world, given Putin's corruption and warmaking. In 2017, Ovechkin launched "PutinTeam," a social media movement supporting Putin and his party in the following year's elections, which were widely decried as fixed. In 2022, following Russia's indefensible invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin said he still supported Putin. "He's my president," the Capitals star said. You do not, in fact, have to support a particular politician just because he's in charge, not even in Russia. Plenty of Russian NHL players have said nothing. Some have even spoken out against Putin or Russia's attack on Ukraine, which weakens the constant refrain from Ovechkin defenders that he's only on Putin's side to protect his family. It's obviously more than expedience; they have each other's cell numbers. But for the most part, Ovechkin has avoided real criticism for his political stances. Part of this is because he is one of the greatest players ever, and sports fans necessarily get very good at separating art from artist. But another part of it is that Ovechkin seems to have a sense of where the line is, and pulls back when public opinion indicates he's crossing it. Since his 2022 comments, Ovechkin has been near-totally silent on politics. Whether or not the rumors about the NHL telling him to clam up are true, his silence has served him well. The league and many fans were able to celebrate his chases of Wayne Gretzky and 1,000 goals without guilt. Ovechkin didn't face any questions tougher than ones about his favorite Italian restaurant.  ( 20 min )

There are few scenarios for a struggling and injury-riddled defense more nightmarish than the one the Detroit Lions' unit had to face on Thursday night. Just four days after suffering through a 31-30 overtime win over the Saints, during which they were on the field for a grueling 90 snaps, they found themselves in Buffalo, dealing with Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills in their home opener. And oh yeah, Kerby Joseph and Brian Branch are both still on the PUP list. So it got bad quickly for the Lions on Thursday night, and it stayed bad. The Bills opened the game with a 10-play, 85-yard touchdown drive. The next possession resulted in eight plays, 79 yards, and another touchdown. And what of their third drive of the game? Surely they didn't score on that one, too? Unfortunately for the Lions that one also went for 57 yards and a touchdown on nine plays. The fourth drive was at least brief: four plays for 68 yards and another touchdown. The Bills were up 27-7 by the tail end of the second quarter, and the cameras kept finding Lions stud pass-rusher Aidan Hutchinson on the sideline, gulping down huge breaths of air and spraying water down the front and back of his jersey. He looked like a guy who was being forced to run a marathon at gunpoint, which arguably would have probably been a more pleasant experience than the one he was living through. The Bills were being 12-personnel bullies, pushing the Lions around with their two tight ends and getting big chunks of yardage however they wanted. There were Josh Allen sprints for first downs, James Cook running for double digits seemingly every time he touched the ball, and wide open receivers sitting in every soft spot the Lions' defense offered up. The Bills ran 74 plays and finished with 34 first downs, meaning that the 41-31 final score flattered the Lions much more than they deserved. By the second half it was obvious to the Bills that they could score as many points as they needed to in order to win the game, and a 10-point margin suited them just fine.  ( 17 min )

On Thursday morning, USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino announced his roster for a forthcoming quartet of games. The first thing that leaps out is that Christian Pulisic's name is nowhere to be found. The story is that the U.S.'s best player will stay in Italy as he heals up from a pair of injuries sustained in his team's embarrassing loss to Belgium in the World Cup, though Pulisic isn't so injured that he couldn't help his team come back and salvage a draw against Lazio last weekend. Per the sourced-up Doug McIntyre, Pulisic "has had a strained relationship with Pochettino" since skipping the 2025 Gold Cup. It's way too early to forecast Pulisic's medium-term future with the program, or the degree to which it will matter. In the opening days of the 2030 World Cup cycle, it's time to think about the future. It's time to welcome the reign of Cavan Sullivan. Sullivan is only 16 years old, but has been marked for future USMNT stardom since early 2024, when he signed the largest Homegrown Player deal in MLS history with the Philadelphia Union. That deal included a pre-transfer agreement to ship him off to Manchester City when he turned 18. Four years is a long time to have to wait, but City clearly felt someone of his talent was worth it, and he's only proven that decision wise in the two years since.  ( 19 min )

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INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Harmeet Dhillon ... Christian Castro

Dear Leader fucking sucks, and Republicans are going to get crushed in the midterms

Kash Patel wants to be the White House’s preeminent attack dog. But as usual, he can’t help but break through the fence and run into traffic. This time, his mistake was a very strange quasi-defense of people convicted of bestiality. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., led the FBI director straight into a trap during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when he asked Patel why his agency had dropped the hiring ban on people who admitted to engaging in sex with animals.  “We did not want to punish victims of bestiality,” Patel replied. His words immediately ricocheted around the internet, as it’s generally understood that humans are the victimizers in such situations. Although he went on to argue that the change was to protect sex trafficking victims who may have been forced into such acts, hi…  ( 7 min )

West Twin Lake (2026) Definitely going to buy one of these printers: OpenPrinter I have ordered a Fitbit Air so I guess Google gets all my data now. ✍️ Reply by email

Somebody pinch me. I never thought I’d see the day when a Republican congressional candidate actually criticized President Donald Trump, the God-King, Lord of the MAGA Movement, He Who Must Not Be Scorned.  But on Sept. 17, with midterm elections closing in, there was Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, staring straight into the camera for a campaign ad and saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” Salazar added: “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” After briefly passing out at her hurling the b-word (betrayed) at Trump, I laughed and thought, “Oh, this is getting delicious.” Salazar is one of the first GOP candidates to publicly criticize Trump The representative’s district in M…  ( 14 min )

Today we’re listening to Professor Kazkaz, a collaboration between German electronic musicians Gregor Tresher and Marcus Schmahl.

You’re weekly dose of funny and silly pictures and memes.  ( 4 min )

This is a simple package to automatically preview in a window the file at point in Dired buffers. Preview windows are closed when they are no longer relevant, while preview buffers are killed if they have not been used for other purposes beside previewing. The package provides several customisation options to control its behaviour. Package name (GNU ELPA): dired-preview Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/dired-preview Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/dired-preview GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/dired-preview Backronym: Directories Invariably Render Everything Decently … preview; dired … PDFs Require Extra Viewing Instructions for Emacs to Work. Below are the release notes Version 0.7.0 on 2026-09-18 This version introduces a few refinements …  ( 2 min )

Emacs can slow down when opening files with exceptionally long lines, such as minified JavaScript or CSS, SQL dumps, or large JSON files. Emacs struggles with these files because it parses bi-directional text properties and applies complex regular expressions for syntax highlighting across thousands of characters on a single line. One solution to prevent these files from slowing down Emacs is to use the built-in global-so-long-mode (or so-long-mode). When such files are visited, this mode detects abnormally long lines and automatically disables expensive features while applying display adjustments to prevent performance degradation. Below is a configuration to improve how global-so-long-mode handles these files, balancing performance and usability. Managing syntax highlighting By default, …  ( 8 min )

As I’ve suggested in recent posts I’m finding it quite challenging to make sense of this roiling debate about AI...  ( 8 min )

The Trump administration is cutting back limits on PFAS, which I think we can all agree is a very bad thing.  ( 68 min )

I guess hell froze over.  ( 58 min )

It’s good to know that not everyone bows to our bumbling leader’s ego.  ( 60 min )

The Kentucky representative tried his darnedest to impeach everyone’s least favorite Cabinet member—before Trumpian lapdog Mike Johnson put a stop to it.  ( 61 min )

Steve Belichick has resigned from his job as defensive coordinator at UNC following an investigation that found "certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina's values and standards of conduct," according to a statement released Thursday by the university. Belichick, the son of head coach Bill Belichick, already had been on medical leave. This follows Mike Lombardi resigning earlier this month from his job as general manager. Little else has been made public by UNC about what led to Lombardi and Steve Belichick's resignations. The university's statement described "a thorough and independent investigation into allegations related to culture and climate within the Carolina football program." It went on to say that the investigation found that what happened was "isolated in scope and not a systemic failure."  ( 16 min )

Rory Dames—the women’s soccer coach currently banned for life from the NWSL, and who has been accused of abuse by more than a dozen former youth players—is no longer listed in the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s centralized disciplinary database. According to a document reviewed by Defector, Dames was removed from the database because a one-year suspension by SafeSport has ended. Per the document, he remains on probation for five years and under a no-contact directive, but those sanctions do not limit his involvement in soccer. The document did not say if his probation started after his suspension ended, or if it ran concurrently. A person who was interviewed for SafeSport’s investigation told Defector they were informed about the sanctions against Dames on July 28 of last year, at which point the former coach and SafeSport were already embroiled in a legal battle. The interviewee was therefore under the impression that the decision was not final, and that the one-year suspension had not started yet.  ( 19 min )

Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent. But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work."  ( 27 min )

There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in a 2025 New Yorker column.  Over the years, Trump’s been called a number of epithets. Cruel, heartless, old, stupid. There remains a collective nervousness around calling Trump a fascist, and few writers av…  ( 22 min )

This week on the show, Harry and I hung out with the hosts of the State of the League podcast for an hour of classic offseason nonsense. We talked about Paul Schrader getting really into AI, which aging stars should be allowed to do steroids, and Brice Sensabaugh. Oh, you're not familiar with Brice Sensabaugh, the fourth-year shooting guard for the Utah Jazz? Well, you're about to be, as I am confident no other NBA podcast has dedicated this much of its runtime to talking about Brice Sensabaugh. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 15 min )

The Moon got whacked. The Moon gets whacked a lot, honestly. You can just look at its beaten, cratered surface to see that. But these days we're pretty good at counting its scars. Since 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and constantly imaging its surface, and both computers and humans check those images closely to see if there have been any new kablammos since the last photograph. There often are. The LRO can spot craters as small as 30 feet across, caused by space rocks roughly the size of a monster truck tire. (NASA's comparison, not mine! And honestly a helpful one.) Those happen about 140 times a year. While you wouldn't want to be under one when it impacted, those smaller collisions are basically lunar weather. But every once in a while, something big comes in. Something big enough to get its own name. Say hello to McGetchin, the Moon's newest crater. It's large, and it's fresh—having been born at some point between April 11 and May 22, 2024, the two nearest passes of the LRO. A small bright spot that hadn't been there in the previous photo, according to McGetchin's discoverer, Robert Wagner. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said. The bright patch was typical of previously buried regolith, lunar rock and dust scattered by the impact. Wagner discovered the new crater in images taken by the LRO's wide-angle camera, which captures more of the surface at a time. After that it was time to point the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at McGetchin to make out more detail, and McGetchin looks pretty rad in close-up. The before and after of the same spot on the Moon's surface:  ( 17 min )

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I should never find myself in a position where I’m forced to cheer on Macklemore. In fact, we’re so far removed from Macklemore’s brief moment of cultural relevance that I shouldn’t even be forced to remember that this guy is even alive. Sometime around 2013, the whole world asked the hip-hop artist to mackle less, and he obliged (likely not of his own free will). That was a happy occasion. Alas, I now must demand that someone besides the artist born as Ben Haggerty mackle less, and that person is Patriots owner and bargain handjob enthusiast Robert Kraft. You’ve perhaps heard about Kraft’s latest venture into senile billionaire fuckery, but I’ll give you the skinny just in case. British folk hobbit Ed Sheeran is doing a stadium tour of the U.S.—this is its own cultural crisis, but that’s for another rant—and booked Macklemore as one of his opening acts. This Normiepalooza tour was due to go off without a hitch (or a memorable hook) until, according to Macklemore, Kraft took umbrage with the rapper’s vocal support of Palestine during his opening set for Sheeran at Giants Stadium earlier this month.  ( 40 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The last few months I've been in the throes of reading and watching information about the murder-for-hire trial of rapper Lil Durk. It's a complete circus that seems to have it all from an entertainment standpoint: snitching gang members, rap lyrics and interviews with streamers used as evidence, Machiavellian defense attorneys, an audience of fanboys and stan armies drawing attention to themselves to the point where people think they might be paid actors and so, so many people treating actual human lives and deaths as fodder for the content machine. One of the worst offenders, a British white man named Trap Lore Ross, is a doofy acolyte of the DJ Akademiks school of cataloguing the violent sensationalism of gang activities and volatile rappers under the guise of “investigative journalism.” He has decided that the Durk trial is his star-making turn, like he’s the Woodward and Bernstein of gang rap. https://youtu.be/FNFL53i0WB0?si=Fg0QyiRCMkVvyfsf  ( 24 min )

This week, five sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS) and their associated players' unions sent letters to gambling regulators in 35 states requesting that something be done to curtail the increasing amount of harassment athletes are facing from angry gamblers. Their proposal: Give teams and players a way to report harassing behavior directly to regulators, and then have the offending bettors banned from placing future bets. It would certainly be good to prevent antisocial losers who type "kill yourself" into an athlete's Instagram comments from ever loading up a betting app again, but the existence of these letters makes one wonder what else these leagues and their unions could be demanding, and why they are not. The problem with sports gambling is not that it gives antisocial losers an excuse to harass athletes, but that it constantly creates new antisocial losers. The population of American sports bettors is not one in which there are just a few bad apples that need to be dealt with, but rather a self-replenishing orchard of bad apples. Legalized sports gambling is all but designed to produce the kind of behavior these athletes and leagues are decrying, and the sportsbooks will go on doing just that no matter how many bans are issued, so long as every year brings a fresh crop of impressionable 18–24 year olds for them to market their products to.  ( 17 min )

Well, Pope Leo gave it a hell of a go, we'll give him that. The former Father Bob, or something, kept the Chicago White Sox in first place in the American League Central for 73 consecutive days, or at least supervised their work well enough to keep them there. The team gave fans souvenir pope hats, and then just kept on giving. Given how unholy the White Sox have been in recent years, the presence atop even this blighted division was hard to believe. As the Cleveland Guardians made their annual September push and the lead got narrower, it got only more so. But the White Sox have provided, and on Wednesday even offered them their own prodigal son, the spectacularly traveled Tommy Pham. He has already been released by two different teams this year and was sold to the White Sox by a third, but after Pham literally cornered general manager Chris Getz in an elevator after Tuesday's game and all but shook the GM by the eyelids to get himself activated from the injured list, he delivered a three-run homer off a thigh-high curve ball from Cleveland's best pitcher, Parker Messick, to put the Sox ahead in Wednesday's vital game, 3-2. At that point, Leo must have figured that any help more divinely inspired than that might resemble game-fixing, and stepped away—and soon enough, he found out that this is the American League, where no power is higher than the mean. Within an inning and a half, Cleveland's profoundly whelming Petey Halpin aired out a 3-1 sinker from White Sox lefty Sean Newcomb for his own three-run homer; prior to that, Halpin had been 1-for-35 against lefties this year. Cleveland held on to win, 6-3.  ( 22 min )

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

We’ve now seen the first sign of the inevitable: President Donald Trump, as the Republican Party limps toward a possible midterm election wipeout, will turn on the GOP. On his Truth Social account on Aug. 26, Trump shared a profane post from a right-wing influencer that read in part: “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up right now.” The post went on to suggest Republicans in Congress are responsible for undercutting Trump, claiming that “the GOP continues to slow-walk every reform people want.” That’s an odd thing for the titular head of the Republican Party to share just a few months out from a pivotal election. Or at least it would be odd if we were dealing with anyone other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump will always blame others for his own failures Tragical…  ( 13 min )

President Donald Trump decided it's a great time for a trade war with Canada.  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Christian Castro ... Patrick Schiltz ... RFK Jr.

or, as we call it, Wednesday

Grand Haven (2026) I would quit all social media, Mastodon included, except that it makes me feel unseen. I don't mind being alone, but I don't enjoy being invisible. On the other hand, maybe being invisible is better than being angry and distracted all the time. It's my wife's birthday, so today will be spent doing everything and anything she wants to do, because I love her. Spending nearly all day away from computers is good for me. ✍️ Reply by email

Today we have a guest recommendation from Sofie Birch, a sound artist and composer, whose newsletter Ambient Abracadabra we highly recommend.

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

It’s Labor Day weekend, and I hope my fellow Americans enjoy laboring, because we’re all going to be doing a lot more of it in order to afford food. And gas. And pretty much everything. The long weekend was ushered in by news that diesel fuel prices hit a record high in the United States on Sept. 4, averaging $5.85 per gallon. That’s what people who use diesel to fuel freight trucks and farm equipment call “a lot.” The new price-tag-at-the-pump record will invariably translate to higher consumer costs, since the folks who grow and ship food and other goods will be spending more on both the growing and the shipping. (The math on this isn’t difficult.) Enjoy Labor Day. Life is about to get even more expensive under Trump. Jaime Brito, executive director of refining and oil products for Dow …  ( 15 min )

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beframe enables a frame-oriented Emacs workflow where each frame has access only to the list of buffers visited therein. In the interest of brevity, we call buffers that belong to frames “beframed”. Package name (GNU ELPA): beframe Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe-changelog Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/beframe Video demo: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-02-28-emacs-beframe-demo/ Backronym: Buffers Encapsulated in Frames Realise Advanced Management of Emacs. Below are the release notes Version 1.6.0 on 2026-09-17 I rewrote large parts of beframe.el to make them more clear and/or to align them with the Elisp style I have developed over t…  ( 2 min )

Web page content lately is littered with unusual Unicode characters that resemble ASCII characters. It's possible this is how an author (whether human or AI) might "sign" work. I use a recorded keystroke macro to brute-force-edly replace such Unicode characters with their ASCII equivalents. This allows me to maintain ASCII-compatible files. For example, to replace the right single quote character having a character code of #x2019, the macro replays M-% ’ RET ' RET ! to replace all occurrences with the straight apostrophe, #x27. I'm not trying to publish someone else's work as my own -- I do provide a reference to source whenever possible. I'm simply trying to keep my content as unadulterated as possible. There are at least three problems with my macro: If #x2019 can't be found, an exclamation mark is placed at point. It fails to replace other single-quote-like Unicode characters such as #x2018 or #x2032. The method is clunky and inelegant to an obscene degree. replace-char-fold, a very interesting custom variable.1 According to its docstring, "Non-nil means replacement commands should do character folding in matches. This means, for instance, that \\=' will match a large variety of Unicode quotes." This is exactly what I need! Now I have Yet Another Fun Emacs Project (YAFEP), which is to create a sleek and robust ASCIIfy Lisp function. And YAFEP aligns fortuitously with this month's Emacs Carnival topic, which is Games. What's been your experience with quoting web content? 1 For a deeper dive into character folding in Emacs, please read the info node on lax matching. These pages on Wikipedia served as references for this article: Right Single Quotation Mark General Punctuation  ( 10 min )

paean to Org mode. That’s nothing new, of course. Many of us are long time, devout Org mode fans. What struck me about Low_Money_633’s praise was his description of it as “the most powerful test editor”. At first, I thought that an odd characterization. It is Emacs, after all, that is the editor. Org is simply, in Emacs parlance, a major mode. But after a little thought, I began to appreciate his characterization. If you use Emacs primarily to write prose—as opposed to code—it’s easy to think of Org mode as what Emacs is really about. Emacs is simply the foundation upon which Org is built. It’s raison d’être is to support Org mode. The thing about writing in Org mode, as Low_Money_633 and the commenters point out, is that it’s all plain text. That means that files tens of thousands of lines long are only a few megabytes as opposed to the several gigabytes that something like Word would take. It also means that the files can live happily in something like Git where previous versions are instantly available when they’re needed. I’ve reached the point where I write more prose than code in Emacs so I understand Low_Money_633’s point of view. That’s the thing about Emacs: it can adapt itself to be just what you need to the point that you can forget what’s happening under the covers. As I’ve said before, when I’m writing, regardless of the type of writing, I’m almost certainly using Emacs. That’s because using anything else is too painful.  ( 5 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Dave answers a question about holding your child back from school for a year.  ( 24 min )

The NWSL received eight complaints about either sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, or retaliation during the first half of this year, according to documents obtained by Defector Media. The reports span multiple teams, and were received between February and June.  The conclusions of any resulting investigations are redacted. So are the names of the teams involved. …  ( 23 min )

Who doesn’t love a little Normal Gossip surprise? OK, yes, we said that last week’s episode was our season finale, but when you’re sitting on a mountain of gossip stories, it would be selfish to not share more, right?  Today’s episode raises one of the ancient questions: Would you rather listen to the 10 hour version of "They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard," or explain your dietary restrictions to a pedant? Maybe this question is just another way of getting at whether you’re antisocial or just a Scorpio? Regardless of your labels, I’m pouring myself a pint and settling in for some quality time with Orlando Bloom.  Today’s gossip comes to us all the way from 2020, when circumstances conspired to put two young, mostly vegetarian van-dwellers and a retired academic in one house. There’s no escaping the questions, conversations, and dinner plans to come, though our little tumbleweeds will certainly try.  ( 16 min )

Ed Sheeran, perhaps best known for writing the kind of music that your second cousin chooses to play for the father-daughter dance at her wedding, cemented his status as a floppy-spine dummy this week by bending the knee to American billionaire idiot Robert Kraft. After rapper Macklemore's statement on Monday that he had been dropped from Sheeran's tour due to pressure from billionaire NFL owners over his vocal support for the Palestinian people, Sheeran further beclowned himself by opting to defer responsibility for the decision of who plays on his own tour. "I was also involved in direct talks with promoters along with activists on both sides to try and find a mutual resolution for all," Sheeran wrote in a multi-bulleted Instagram statement defending his choice to allow rich guys to determine his line-up, "but the venue's and promoter's decision was final." There is no "mutual resolution for all" when you are being strong-armed like this. What's embarrassing about Sheeran's response here is that he does not seem to understand that his pants have been pulled down around his ankles. Instead of pulling them back up, or even saying that it's rude to have done this, he's tripping forward as if nothing has happened.  ( 19 min )

On Tuesday, Tottenham did something that has been out of character since the start of the 2026-27 season: It scored a goal. The goal came in the 69th minute of its third-round League Cup match against Liverpool, it came from a corner, and it ultimately didn't matter all that much. Connor Gallagher capitalized on a weak run-out from backup Pool Boys goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili and headed the ball in, giving Tottenham its first goal in any competition since its 5-1 pounding of Championship side Charlton Athletic in the previous round of the League Cup. Gallagher's header was a necessary tally, even if Tottenham eventually bowed out of the League Cup anyway by a score of 3-1, because the club has been afflicted with an offensive malaise in the Premier League never before seen in the 144-year history of Tottenham Hotspur. Maybe just seeing the ball hit the back of the net again will spark something for the club, and boy does it need a spark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oG66a7VmfY Through four Premier League games, Tottenham has scored zero goals, and only by similarly impotent chance creation and finishing from Nottingham Forest and Everton does the North London side have any points domestically. Despite spending a lot of money this summer, Spurs are currently in exactly the same spot that they have finished the last two campaigns, 17th on the table and with more questions than answers. This is the first time in the club's history that it has started a season goalless across four games. It's a new low in the series of humiliations, postponed briefly by winning the 2024-25 Europa League, that has stricken Tottenham over the last two-plus seasons.  ( 27 min )

The operative fact is that the Mets were eliminated from the playoffs on Monday. Everything about Pete Alonso's return to Queens this week as an Oriole is inseparable from that, in time but also in causation, to a subset of Mets fans. They gave him four separate standing ovations on Monday not only because he was a well-liked former player—and go ask a WFAN call screener from 2024 to see how ahistorical it would be to say he was universally beloved at the time—but because of what his absence from New York represents: a team with a $340 million payroll, again, that missed the playoffs, again. By the end of Tuesday night, it was clearer that the Alonso lovefest wasn't entirely about Alonso. The big man homered off closer Kodai Senga in the ninth to tie the game, the 300th of his career, and he reacted by throwing his bat back toward the visitors' dugout like a Thracian peltast. And then, once Alonso had circled the bases, the real fun began. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltUtyx18bWM  ( 20 min )

The YouTube title of this week's All Ball episode is “Jalen Hurts Is OVERRATED.” This sort of headline is known as “clickbait,” or “ragebait.” But what if I told you that Arif Hasan and I spent time in this episode striving toward a more nuanced version of “overrated,” a word which itself has become overrated? I bet you feel a little less rageful now. A little less baited. I bet you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, I never realized that the words ‘overrated’ and ‘good’ need not be mutually exclusive!” This is because you overrated yourself. You thought you were a genius right until this moment, but it turns out that you are are a stupid, easily led little twerp. That’s why you require the full-throated force of All Ball to become a more knowledgeable, more complete person. Also we make fun of the Packers for eating shit against Carson Wentz.  ( 17 min )

For a brief period two decades ago, Miami was an amazing place to be a fan of women's professional basketball. The team had a roster full of promise and reached the playoffs in their second season of existence. The locals showed up for games and exceeded the number of required season ticket deposits, thanks to a successful promotional campaign which included a local NBA All-Star making a publicized entrance via personal watercraft. Rosie O'Donnell, at the height of her fame, could be found in the stands cheering on the home team. It was an excellent start for a sports franchise that looked to be around for the long haul. After only three years, it all vanished. The Miami Sol joined the WNBA for the 2000 season, and were gone by November of 2002. Despite good attendance, a decent overall record, and a playoff appearance, the team suddenly folded, to the dismay of the players and the local community. The team's demise was due to the WNBA's 2003 restructuring agreement, which allowed for independent ownership that was not connected to an NBA team. This also meant that the financial responsibility for the WNBA teams moved from the centralized NBA league to the individual NBA franchises themselves. The Miami Heat declined to opt in to support the Sol's continued existence, and so the team was dissolved. As today's WNBA grows into new markets, it has also offered nostalgic hope to fans of previously defunct franchises. The other two teams that folded alongside the Sol are still in the conversation: the reborn Portland Fire, who are finishing their first season, and the Orlando Miracle, who were sold and relocated to become the Connecticut Sun (then sold again, soon to become the rebooted Houston Comets). For now, there is no similar plan for Miami. Women's pro basketball returned to the area in 2025 when the player-run league Unrivaled chose nearby Medley for its headquarters. While it's nice to see WNBA stars play three-on-three in the offseason, fans in Miami still yearn for something permanent.  ( 53 min )

I just noticed this Politico piece which contains a poll they just conducted about AI and the odds that AI...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: James Comey ... Lindsey Halligan ... David Streever

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is on the lookout for statues of ancient Babylonian deities. No, really.  ( 60 min )

grow the fuck up, bro

If there’s ever been anything Donald Trump loves more than gold, it’s a camera. The former reality TV host has willingly debased himself in a myriad of ways — doing an ad for Pizza Hut, shaving Vince McMahon’s head during a wrestling match, painful “acting” appearances in “Home Alone 2″ and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — all to get a sweet, sweet dose of video proof of his existence. Right now Trump can’t stop begging for attention, even though it’s immensely damaging to his party’s midterm prospects. He forced the Republicans to throw him a two-day fake convention so he could give lengthy prime-time speeches. He holds frequent on-camera events in the Oval Office, forgoing the work of actual governance so he can be photographed sitting behind the Resolute Desk. “Sitting” may be the operat…  ( 8 min )

8mm film reels on my shelf (2026) Using an LLM lets me over-complicate my workflow at unprecedented speeds. I opened Obsidian this morning. Why? I dunno, really. Sometimes I just want to launch an app and see what it does without remembering bindings or updating packages or generally futzing the way I do with Emacs. Obsidian always makes a good first impression, but it quickly falls apart when I try to do the things that I've already dialed in with Emacs. I waste an hour or two and then forget about Obsidian for another few months. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

On today’s episode of Across the Horizon, host Bob Holmes from the band SUSS finishes his conversation with Sarah Davachi from last week.

Ana de Armas is a Cuban-Spanish actress who has built an international career across Spanish-language cinema and major Hollywood productions.  ( 5 min )

The bureau will no longer automatically disqualify applicants who’ve engaged in bestiality. And we’re not talking about the canine units.  ( 58 min )

The Supreme Court put an end to the president’s cockamamie scheme to have the USPS make mail-in voting a nightmare. Get ready for the tantrums.  ( 67 min )

If you’re a subscriber to Wired.com I want to suggest that you read this piece: Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust...  ( 9 min )

I wanted to share a few more thoughts with you about this roiling public debate about AI and the dangers...  ( 11 min )

Conventional wisdom holds that a midterm election only fully comes into focus after Labor Day. That’s when a critical slice...  ( 7 min )

Boathouse, Gaylord MI (2026) This roll was taken at a friend's cottage near Grayling and in Grand Haven. Adirondack chairs Bourbon by the lake Surfer and stumbling guy Wave breaking on Grand Haven pier ✍️ Reply by email

Boathouse door (2026) STATUS: Considering a withdrawal from Mastodon TODO: Hang out with my grandson READING: "Thinking In Systems" by Donella Meadows LISTENING: Various artists on cassette tape I sat down here today thinking I wanted a bunch of separate blogs, again. Then I came to my senses, but I still don't know how to handle the small posts. Are they still Notes? Does it make sense to separate them? Does it matter? ✍️ Reply by email

I have always had a thing for Olivia Wilde. I now have even more of a thing for Olivia Wilde. ✍️ Reply by email

The year is 2022. Movies are finally back, Bad Bunny is taking over the world, and everyone is trying to become a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The immediate post-pandemic years were strange ones along many axes, most notably the economy. In the short, six-year window following 2020, a schlubby South Bay denizen named Sam Bankman-Fried became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, watched his empire crumble, and got sent to federal prison, where he currently resides. The first episode of this season of Only If You Get Caught tells the story of the incredible rise and swift fall of SBF, and does so in this specific context. More than anything, he's a creature of the Covid economy, the odd cash-rich, activity-poor moment that defined 2020 and 2021. That moment allowed a company like FTX to become as valuable as it did because of the atomized culture of gambling that followed in Covid's wake. To help tell the story, I drafted in Jacob Silverman. Jacob is the author of three books, including Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud as well as Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He covers crypto, technology, and capitalism, and I spent the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas with him in 2025.  ( 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 college football, Reacher, unsalted snacks, and more. Your letters: Elliott:  ( 51 min )

The 2026 U.S. Open is done, with Elena Rybakina and Alexander Zverev hoisting the trophies. The Defector tennis corps got together to talk about their impressions of the tournament, their feelings on players who didn't win either Final, and the hair situations of the ATP Nos. 3 and 7. Enjoy! Patrick: Lorenzo Sonego, I'm pouring vinegar on you, goat. Two points and all this could have been different. Instead, Alexander Zverev has won as many slams as Sincaraz combined this year and we had to talk about 20,000 ball bounces instead of Carlos Alcaraz's hair. Kathryn: Which is tragic because it looked the best it's ever been, especially considering the, uh, previous situation, and that he was bald at this exact time last year. Between the Zverev slam count and the Alcaraz hair situation, change simply happens too quickly.  ( 46 min )

In a time when the algorithmically determined social internet serves primarily to trick people into becoming hosts to various parasites or simply drive them mad, it might be perversely comforting to imagine that the people on the other side of the screen are knowing, cynical actors, free from the brain-shredding effects of life online. Noxious as it is, some sort of harmony or human logic would at least be familiar and capable of being understood. But no, those guys are the algorithm's subjects too. Two of those guys are Hunter Biden and YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan, presently involved in what I'll call a crypto scam email whoopsie perpetrated by the former with the unwitting help of the latter. I find it quite instructive. You can see in the odd anti-collaboration something like the algorithm talking to itself. There are no good proper nouns here, only two people driven to make the world a little worse by the incentives of their platforms. Presumably you know who Biden is. The son of former president Joe Biden was a fascination of right-wing media for years, both for the salacious details of his years of addiction and for the various sinecures his father hooked him up with. In October 2020, the New York Post published a bunch of supposedly damning emails from a laptop the younger Biden inexplicably brought into a Wilmington computer repair shop. The laptop scandal was less interesting for its particulars than for the way it turned him into a sort of hyperobject among right-wingers. To them, Hunter Biden was the neat personification of both the personal moral decay and corrupt dealings of their opposition.  ( 27 min )

Fair warning: This is a short blog post in which you are going to encounter exhausting behavior from some fellas who will leave you pining for the restoration of our culture's sense of shame. Texas beat Ohio State in dramatic fashion on Saturday night, and Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was all jacked up after the final whistle. After having skipped out on his halftime sideline interview due to a technical delay, Sarkisian decided that he also did not want to talk to ESPN sideline reporter Holly Rowe at the conclusion of the game. As Rowe attempted to corral Sarkisian on the field, he shouted some stuff in her direction, threw up the horns sign, and then ran off. https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mvenpr4jw22n  ( 18 min )

The new Polymarket ad spot opens with LeBron James stepping onto an elevator and pushing a button labeled "SPORTS." This is not some AI-extruded, near-enough visual representation of a generic basketball player of the stature of LeBron James. It is the actual LeBron James, newly a paid endorser of Polymarket, the marginally less sneering and brazen—but still apocalyptically corrupt—of the two big prediction markets. To get to the SPORTS floor, in the ad, actual LeBron will pass betting floors for culture, economy, and weather; above the sports floor are floors for politics and cryptocurrency. Polymarket is working on all of these areas, you see. The elevator doors open and LeBron steps into chaos. It's a scene yoinked visually and tonally from The Wolf of Wall Street—a trading floor baccha…  ( 22 min )

From Emacs 31.1, there is a user option to keep previous versions of packages when upgrading packages; in order not to break separate instances of Emacs which may be still running and using the previous package versions. This allows you to continue to use several concurrent versions that you may be using. This is easy to use with with (setopt package-retention-policy t). (...)  ( 3 min )

speeding up Emacs terminal emulators. As Cherti says, Emacs terminals can be slow especially when they get pounded with a lot of output. He offers some suggestions to help. Those changes are mostly what you’d expect. They turn off things like line wrapping that take extra cycles to calculate. Most of his post is his suggested code to remedy the slowness—although he does offer an explanations of what they’re doing—so rather than repeat what he’s already written, I’ll just send you to his post for the details. If you’ve been bothered by slow Emacs terminal emulators, take at look at Cherti’s post.  ( 5 min )

I said I’ll do it, and I did. I got my Glove80 early! I looked at my emails yesterday afternoon, and there they were, waiting for me in the mailbox. I was surprised at how light the box felt, even though Xah mentioned it several times in his review. I knew it was made of plastic, but this light? Yep. The other thing that surprised me was the size: they are smaller than I thought, which in my case is excellent (I have small hands). I still need to pair it (or them? as in both parts? the gloves?) with Bluetooth to both my Mac and my Linux desktop, since I only used them connected (to charge them). There is a lot to like about this keyboard, but first the big caveat: getting used to it. Them. The thing. Ugh, take your pick. Thankfully, this was not a surprise. It’s the big issue with this key…  ( 4 min )

INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Roberts Court ... Troy Meink

okay, the lights are clearly on. but is anyone home?

Almost immediately after finishing the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I started re-reading the books. I’m blown away by how much the series has pushed me even further into anarchist, community-oriented behavior. We recently moved from MA back to Rhode Island. We were making a lot of trips back and forth between our old house and the storage unit we rented near our new place. After one particularly long day, I pulled off the highway for a quick bite to eat, and saw one of the homeless folks I know panhandling.  ( 20 min )

Inserting a chapter with artwork every few seconds turns an MP3 file into an approximation of a video file. I can listen to videos as audio-first, and glance at my lock screen if I need some visual context.  ( 4 min )

Today’s mix premieres the new Corntuth record, The Nightingale Floor, which comes out next week on Flow State Records and Aural Canyon.

Borrowing from the playbook of all master negotiators, President Donald Trump has gained the upper hand in his ongoing trade war with Canada by … wait for it … threatening to rename a lake.  On Aug. 25, President Deals McDealington threw down the gauntlet and showed those barbaric Canadians the fate they’ll face if they don’t bend to America’s will: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” BOOM! What say you now, callous Canucks? You didn’t expect our beloved MAGA president to go hyrdonymic on your a--, did you? The trade war Trump started for no particular reason – the one likely to harm Americans economical…  ( 14 min )