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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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 )

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

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK. But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t …  ( 2 min )

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

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

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 )

Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willison sees two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it. Both of these are bad! Given this incident, the Hugging Face situation, and the Wiki attack, the obvious question right now is how many more incidents like this are out there waiting to be discovered?  ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄ Dave Farley: Stop asking the sci-fi question: ‘Is it conscious?’ Start asking the engineering …  ( 3 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 )

96 Aboard Newsletter: Humans Are the Only Real Agents img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;f…  ( 10 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 )

At some point, the horror genre ran out of things to make evil. Demons? Done. Dolls? Done. Cars? Done. Televisions? Done. So what was left? Apparently, a bong. That is the beautifully stupid premise behind Evil Bong, a movie that takes the familiar idea of a cursed object and asks what happens when the cursed...  ( 8 min )

Law enforcement has changed dramatically over the years. We’ve had detectives, SWAT teams, highway patrol officers, private investigators and every conceivable variation of fictional cop imaginable. Apparently, nobody had adequately addressed the threat of uncontrolled urination. Enter Piss Patrol. With a title that sounds like either a bargain-bin action movie or a public-service announcement produced...  ( 9 min )

Forget superheroes from distant planets, billion-dollar franchises and men who can fly while wearing technologically advanced armor. Spaghetti Man asks a much more important question: What if a guy was made of spaghetti? It’s a question that modern civilization was apparently desperate to have answered. Spaghetti Man is the sort of gloriously strange independent movie...  ( 8 min )

Somewhere in the world, a filmmaker looked at the enormous history of horror cinema and decided there was still one story Hollywood had failed to tell. Not another haunted house. Not another possessed doll. Not another group of teenagers wandering into the woods despite having access to Google Maps. No. It was time to return...  ( 9 min )

There are movies that begin with a perfectly reasonable question. There are movies that begin with a terrible idea. And then there is Killer Thong, which presumably began with someone staring at a piece of underwear and thinking, “You know what? That thing looks dangerous.” Somewhere along the way, that thought became a movie. This...  ( 9 min )

There are movies that make you question the laws of physics. There are movies that make you question the laws of filmmaking. And then there are movies like Sharks N Da Hood, which make you wonder who looked at a shark movie and thought, “You know what this needs? A trip to the neighborhood.” Because...  ( 9 min )

There are bad movies, there are so-bad-they’re-good movies, and then there are movies like Death Toilet: Number Two, which seem to have been created after someone lost a bet and was forced to prove that literally any household object could become the star of a horror franchise. A toaster? Too obvious. A refrigerator? Been done....  ( 9 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

Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. more…  ( 10 min )

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.

There are great albums, there are important albums, and then there are albums that permanently change the expectations placed on  ( 18 min )

Outlaw Country is one of the most important movements in the history of American music because it changed what country

There are plenty of places that can claim to have played an important role in music history. Liverpool had the  ( 43 min )

Frank Zappa spent his entire career making sure nobody could comfortably put him in a box. He was a rock  ( 31 min )

There are plenty of horror movies about monsters, demons, zombies and possessed children. But Rabid Grannies asks a much more  ( 9 min )

In a brief order, the Supreme Court appears to have shut down the Trump White House’s plan to take over...  ( 7 min )

As you’ve likely seen, a strange and perhaps positive chain of events unfolded over the weekend in the world of...  ( 7 min )

Hello Einar, I am writing this as a public letter in response to the blog post you published on 2026-09-13 with the title An apology to Protesilaos Stavrou and David Wilson. I accept the apology, though I think there is no need for one. I would personally not delete anything. Instead, I would add a link on top to point to the newer publication, plus some explanation. This teaches each of us to not take everything too seriously and to not pull the trigger before considering the case. At any rate, I am fine with your choice. Text is an especially difficult medium of communication because we do not exchange non-verbal cues. It is thus easy to imagine something which is not there and to then attribute bad intent to its author. For example, I find myself laughing at the way I formulated a certa…  ( 2 min )

Emacs terminal buffers like eat, vterm, ghostel, term, and ansi-term can become slow when processing large volumes of standard output. Watching Emacs freeze while a build script dumps thousands of lines is frustrating, but terminal latency is not an unavoidable cost of living inside Emacs. Applying a few targeted configuration changes will eliminate scroll lag and restore immediate responsiveness. This article provides a configuration that speed up terminal buffers. Before we begin, please consider sharing this article on your website, blog, Mastodon, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, or other social media platforms. Sharing it will help other Emacs users discover how to improve the performance of their terminal emulators. Complete configuration for high-performance terminal buffers The fo…  ( 11 min )

Homebrew, a repository of easy to install apps and libraries. I use it all the time because it’s so much easier than hunting up all the dependencies required for compiling them yourself. If you’re a Linux user, you may or may not be familiar with Homebrew. It provides the same services for Linux but my—possible wrong—impression is that its Linux take-up is not as great as it is in macOS. Regardless, if you’re on Linux or macOS, you should definitely check it out. The TL;DR of this post is that Homebrew has just released version 7.0.0, a major release. That probably wouldn’t be worth an Irreal post except for the “major release” part. On the macOS side, macOS 10.5 and earlier are no longer supported. Being a Mac-head, I didn’t check discontinued versions on Linux so if you’re using Homebrew on Linux you should check that out. The other big change for Mac-heads is that Intel Macs are moved to Tier 3. You can check out the announcement for exactly what that means but basically it indicates that support is limited and end-of-life is approaching (in September of 2027). Homebrew is an excellent repository and well worth investigating if you’re not familiar with it. I still have an Intel Mac so it’s a bit of a pain that support is diminishing but I need to upgrade anyway so this is probably the push I need.  ( 5 min )

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Paris https://emacs-doctor.com/ Tue Sep 15 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1530 Etc/UTC - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2100 Asia/Kolkata - 2330 Asia/Singapore PDX Emacs (in person) https://pdx.social/@howard/117147689957341583 - Tue Sept 15 6:00 pm in Portland, OR M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Sep 16 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore OrgDevMeetup https://bbb.emacsverse.org/rooms/orgdevmeetup Sat Sep 19 0100 America/Vancouver - 0300 America/Chicago - 0400 America/Toronto - 0800 Etc/UTC - 1000 Europe/Berlin - 1330 Asia/Kolkata - 1600 Asia/Singapore EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF h…  ( 3 min )

Hey, it’s the… *counts on fingers*… 22nd anniversary of me using Emacs to watch TV and movies! And in the start, it was a snappy, focused package that just listed directory contents and let me play the files… but then it grew to take care of resuming where I left off, and fixing the frame rate of the TV to fit the video file, and lately it’s also automatically choosing the correct subtitles and audio track. This means that it’s now calling mediainfo before playing the file to get all that data. And since it’s accessing the files over nfs, and mediainfo apparently has to load the entire file (or large parts) to cough up that data, things have gotten slower: Look at that! It’s horrible! I have to wait, er, two seconds before I can watch Saturday Night Live?! How can anybody live lik…  ( 6 min )

vc than I installed the bleeding edge and found Emacs 31 went and did it properly. Right there in the 31 NEWS: a whole C-x v w working-tree map. So before I get too attached to my own code I thought I had better do an honest head-to-head. Verdict up front: I am keeping mine, with one key moved. Here is why. First, what 31 actually ships under C-x v w: w c (vc-add-working-tree) prompts for a directory, then a branch, but you have to create a branch for yourself, where as my version and also Magit ask for the name of the branch to create, as when creating a new worktree, wouldn't you always want to create a branch? Also with the built-in there is no placeholder initial name, with something involving the branch name, so this command currently feels a little disjointed. w w (vc-sw…

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 )

The man has a real gift for jumping on a country’s last political nerve, doesn’t he?  ( 58 min )

If you thought no Trump would want to be seen associating with a bald-headed buddy of Vladimir Putin, you’ve probably never been offered a discount on a private island.  ( 60 min )

Even by the crude and stupid standards of modern conservatism, Brandon Herrera is uniquely crude and stupid.  ( 62 min )

What does it mean for an NFL team to be "AI-first?" It's a question that football fans have been pondering ever since New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo revealed in May that the organization would be striving to "to think AI-first." It was hard to detect the influence of AI in the Jets' 23-10 win over the Titans in Week 1, but maybe that's just because the paltry competition didn't require unleashing the awesome power of Microsoft Copilot on the gridiron. They might be saving that for Week 2 against the Packers. The organization did, however, find a novel use for AI away from the field. On Aug. 23, a random Titans fan tweeted, "If the #TitanUp lose to the Jets week 1 I will walk from MetLife Stadium all the way to Nissan Stadium non stop." This is the kind of post that yippy social media managers dream about, because it creates the opportunity to use the official team account to clap back, perhaps even epically, and thus earn a lot of replies that say, "Yoooooo, admin snapped on this one [three fire emoji]" from guys who have forgotten the password to their Robinhood account. This morning, whoever runs the official Jets Twitter account made their move, and quote-tweeted the Titans fans' tweet with this:  ( 17 min )

On Monday morning, the rapper Macklemore posted a lengthy Instagram statement alleging that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and other NFL owners pitched a hissy-fit to get him dropped from the United States leg of Ed Sheeran's tour. Kraft, who has never shown much interest in music, allegedly called Ed Sheeran to tell him who was allowed to open his shows. According to Macklemore, "Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues." Macklemore was set to play Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which is owned Kraft and his family, on September 25 and 26. Now, Sheeran will play there without him. https://www.instagram.com/p/DdRdsy0m2HK/?hl=en&img_index=4  ( 24 min )

How strange it is to watch a whole Slam and feel as though we learned almost nothing about the true power hierarchy at the top of the men's tour. In Sunday afternoon's U.S. Open final, Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton, 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2. Check the box next to every single boring prediction: At least one tiebreak would be played; Shelton would struggle heroically to return serves; Zverev would play visibly nervy tennis in at least one juncture of the match and captivate viewers with his pre-serve ball-bouncing routines, but ultimately keep owning this matchup and lefties in general. We got all of that. The match was neither an especially compelling spectacle nor particularly predictive of the future. I would be somewhere from surprised to gobsmacked if either one of these players won a Slam next season. The central thing I'll remember about this match is that Zverev did not initially realize he had won it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VQEluGKDF4  ( 25 min )

Ryan Garcia, the often troubled and always magnetic Californian who to this point in his career seemed unsure if he’d rather be an influencer who fights or a fighter who influences, struck a blow for his fighter side on Saturday in Las Vegas. Garcia hit Conor Benn flush in the face with the mightiest right hand he’s capable of throwing early in the second round of their welterweight title bout, putting his outclassed British antagonist down shortly before putting him out. If Garcia’s not on top of the fight world already, he can at least see it from where he sits after his boffo performance.  As four-minute bouts go, this was a helluva fight. Benn’s father is Nigel Benn, a former world middleweight champion who was absolutely beloved in his native U.K. as his fight career peaked in the 1990s. Through those bloodlines and shrewd promotion, the younger Benn became wildly popular back home. Last year, he headlined two fight cards in front of sold-out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London with Chris Eubank Jr., whose father, Chris Eubank Sr., was the elder Benn’s main rival decades earlier. Eubank Jr. came out on top in the sons' first meeting, in April 2025, by a close but unanimous decision after 12 rounds. Their November 2025 rematch also went the distance, but Benn put Eubank Jr. down twice in the 12th round and the judges had him far ahead on all scorecards come the last bell.  ( 25 min )

There's been a lot of clamoring for answers as to what happened in the fourth quarter of Sunday's unusually messy divisional matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. And yet for much of the game, and even into the fourth quarter, there was very little in terms of unanswered questions. When Trey Smack kicked a field goal to stretch Green Bay's lead to eight with 13:17 remaining in the fourth, all the juice was on the Packers' side and the game was, honestly, a little boring. But the Vikings had jumped offside on the play, which made fourth-and-6 into fourth-and-1. Green Bay coach Matt LaFleur weighed his options and decided Fuck those points, opting to drive the nail into the coffin instead. Jordan Love got stuffed on the ensuing play, and the Packers never scored again. This is notable because the Vikings immediately went on a 22-point scoring run, and won by a final score of 39-22. Is it as simple as the Vikings finding a new gear in the fourth? The Packers and their analytics darling QB sputtering to a halt? Momentum plays? Those dastardly refs doing more of their ref chicanery against your favorite team, which is also their most mortal enemy?  ( 20 min )

The Video Assistant Referee is supposed to get everything right. This is an incredibly high standard to hold any sort of officiating, but this is VAR's main selling point and raison d'être. All of the delays, ticky-tack calls, and general disruption to the flow of a soccer match are supposed to be worth it; after all, who doesn't want the correct call made when an incorrect call could decide a match, a season, a legacy? But of course, VAR is not perfect, and it will never be perfect, even when called to rule on supposedly cut-and-dry offside decisions. As soon as any sort of subjectivity is thrown into the mix, VAR is no better than a normal ref, and oftentimes worse. With that in mind, I submit into evidence Erling Haaland's 60th minute goal during Sunday's Manchester derby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKfkzSKDkHM At first glance, this is exactly the type of goal decision that VAR should excel at sorting through. Haaland's back-post finish was ruled out on the field by the sideline referee for an offside, as he judged that Haaland was ahead of both the ball and the last defender when Josko Gvardiol struck the ball across. Since it was, even in live action, a very close decision, a VAR review was all but assured, and said review found that Haaland was actually onside at the time of Gvardiol's pass. The camera angle showed on replays didn't make that clear, but the lines as deployed by the VAR, which are more accurate than the TV cameras, did help decide that the Norwegian was just onside. Great, goal given.  ( 28 min )

Elon Musk loves them. Donald Trump thinks they’re “the best hope for Germany” and that they’ll “MGGA” (Make Germany Great Again). They’re an existential threat for fact-based reasoning, democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism. And they're in position to become the first far-right party to lead a German state since 1945. Over 77 percent of the eligible population of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls on Sept. 6 in order to vote for their new state government. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was able to cruise to victory with a plurality 43.8 percent of the vote, slightly outperforming their polling. While the composition of the government has yet to be ironed out, it’s an unprecedented win for a party whose entire platform is based on hating immigrants and non-white Germans. For anti-right activists in Saxony-Anhalt, the weeks and days leading up to the election had been marked by a mix of anxiety, defiance, and energy, as organizations set up pro-democracy rallies and events throughout the state. Bettina Wiengarn is a board member and spokesperson of the Zerbster Bündnis für Demokratie, a local association based in Zerbst, a small town in eastern Saxony-Anhalt. She and others had gathered to watch the results roll in.  ( 35 min )

You can always count on our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Elijah Acquah, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.  Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

If you've read Nicholas Russell, here or elsewhere, you've gathered that he is thoughtful, erudite, and extremely curious. In addition to approximately one million reviews and essays here at Defector, he's published more than a dozen interviews, and they've ranged all over: politics podcasters, a film critic, an indie musician, a veteran foreign correspondent, a cruciverbalist, an English professor and Toni Morrison scholar, and the retired WNBA journeywoman Carolyn Swords. By now, you have probably also picked up on the fact that he is uncommonly driven. Reporting is hard. Interviewing, or at least doing it well, is hard. Freelancing is hard as hell. Russell churns out excellent freelance work while holding down a day job as a bookseller, in addition to writing short fiction. Now he is a…  ( 70 min )

Nothing beats watching a billionaire eat filth in public, unless the chefs and waiters at Maison De Merde are all billionaires too. And so it is that Steve Ballmer's semi-abject capitulation to reality, and to the penalty he was handed in the face of overwhelming evidence of salary cap contravention in the guise of botanical fraud, arrives without either the proper level of humiliation or the burn-down-the-village revenge that would have satisfied us all infinitely more. The fun was in the extremes. The middle road stinks. No one pines for the inevitable. Yet, there it was, conveniently dumped on an NFL Sunday night where only those people who were sick of Giants-Cowboys but couldn't yet fall asleep were paying attention. Ballmer took the knee with just a hint of middle finger behind the back, proclaiming that least defensible of legal positions, "I'm clean but I'll do the time anyway."  ( 23 min )

College football fans who tuned into ESPN's College GameDay this Saturday were forced to encounter the alarming visage of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. To make matter worse, he monopolized nearly 10 minutes of air time in order to stump for the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bill that is like a lot of things Ted Cruz stumps for, in that it is explicitly designed to make workers' lives worse. Proponents of the PCSA rely on a familiar set of talking points when hyping up their pet bill, which could be voted on by the Senate this month. They are quick to point out that college sports are in "chaos," and they have plenty of material to support their case. They can point to the ludicrous number of player transfers that happen every offseason, constant conference realignment, ballooning NIL budg…  ( 25 min )

INSIDE: Marshall Rawson ... Bo French ... Joe diGenova

everything Dear Leader got up to on his 48-hour vacation could have been done right here at home

In countries outside of the US, “libertarianism” is often synonymous with anarchy. In the US, it typically refers to folks who are really into unrestrained capitalism without the social support. I was talking about this with a libertarian friend some time ago, and they said something along the lines of… What you’re describing means you’d have to really depend on other people. They meant it in a bad way.  ( 20 min )

I thought this was very funny. ✍️ Reply by email

Today we’re listening to John Carroll Kirby, an American pianist and composer from Los Angeles.

Two songs. Two bands. Two completely different ideas of what punk rock could be. The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and  ( 8 min )

My Exif Manager app (Linux) After scanning a roll of film, I like to add camera make/model/lens exif data to the files. For years, I've done this via exiftool using the command line. It's not hard, but I thought I'd see if Claude Code could whip up something a little nicer to use. Turns out it could. Launch the app, open a folder, choose from a pre-defined list of my cameras and lenses, and write the exif info to the files. It took Claude maybe 30 minutes from my prompt to a working app. That's all I needed it to do, but I got a little fancy and added captioning, which many photo apps make more difficult than it should be. Speaking of making things difficult, some apps (::cough Darktable::) don't deal well with metadata during export, so I have my app allow me to write the information to already-exported files based on file name. Let's say I have Darktable export a bunch of images to ~/Pictures/Export but those images lose their captions (it happens!). I tell my app where the exported files are and it matches file names and writes the metadata to those files. The trouble with having an LLM at hand all the time is that now I want to work with it to build or extend little apps for everything. It's too easy, helpful, and fun to ignore. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Shot a roll in the Olympus OM-1n with the Zuiko 85mm f/2.0. I find long lenses nearly as challenging as wide ones. Adirondack chair on West Twin Lake Lock on boat house door Bryan's boat on the lift Weeds on the shore at Bryan's cottage Stairs on Bryan's dock Alice's food and water dishes Model wooden boat Flowers on our deck wrapping around nearby lamp post Kayaks Portrait of Jack by Bryan Lewis ✍️ Reply by email

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 )

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

Wildfires are once again eating their way across California. Three fires, one near Big Sur, one enveloping Lassen and Sierra counties and one raging in Humboldt County, have burned tens of thousands of acres of land, poisoned endangered condors, and closed off various highways and state parks indefinitely. The aforementioned fires have barely been contained by authorities. When (or, *shudder*, if) the fires die down, more fires will follow in their wake. And more after that, and more after that. Wildfire is a natural part of California’s environment, and thanks to humankind’s disastrous warping of the planet’s climate, fires will only grow more widespread and destructive in the years to come. Now, woke types might tell you that all of this is bad. But what if I told you that the ongoing s…  ( 1 min )

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

Aerial view of a 49.5-megawatt data center under construction in Vernon, Calif., on July 14, 2026. Myung J. Chun/LA Times via Getty Images I was watching some hot World Cup action the other day when this local ad from a lobbying group called Virginia Connects graced my television screen. I didn’t know that Virginia Connects was behind this spot until the very end of it, which is standard practice for all evilmongers these days. If I see a commercial that begins with a tasteful montage of Americans doing super-serious, deeply American things, that ad will inevitably end with a plug for AI, Meta pinky-swearing to keep your kids safe, or a promise that Jesus gets me. This Virginia Connects ad plays out in a similar fashion. It opens with an all-American dad using his smartphone to give his a…  ( 1 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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…  ( 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…  ( 12 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 )

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…  ( 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

How best to react to the latest news on the Los Angeles Rams? Easy. With complete abandon and logical recklessness. That's how the veterans do it. Said latest news, that massive offseason signing Myles Garrett has fouled his knee, failed to will it healthy again, and now will have surgery that will take out all of September and a chunk of October as well. Garrett was the big swing of the summer, but the fact that it was the Rams that took it is no surprise. General manager Les Snead and head coach Sean McVay love acquisitional bat speed more than nearly any team not named Real Madrid or Barcelona, and between Garrett and veteran ace in the hole Aaron Donald, they surely constructed the most unsettling defensive front since their own Fearsome Foursome six decades ago. In fact, they also apparently took another shot at cornering the pass-rush market by making a strenuous run at Las Vegas Raiders designated menace Maxx Crosby, one which failed in significant part because Crosby decided in the wake of his abortive trade to Baltimore that he wanted against all odds to remain a Raider, a choice we presume he will rue for the next six decades or so.  ( 20 min )

West Sacramento Athletics manager Mark Kotsay knew the drill from months of exercising it. Another game was on fire, and he needed someone who could at least let it burn itself out, so he went to Carlos Cortes in the bottom of the eighth inning, the bases loaded with Mariners and four runs already in. And Cortes did his duty, inducing Victor Robles to fly out modestly to right field to end the inning. Seattle still led, 16-1, but Cortes did the required work. Then he went out again for the ninth because it was still 16-1 and the A's didn't really need him to be the left fielder any more. And, predictably, he got kicked around the lot because that's what left fielders asked to pitch tend to do. He walked Cal Raleigh. Then he walked Julio Rodriguez. Then he walked Brock Rodden. Then he gave up a two-run single to Cole Young and a sacrifice fly to Michael Arroyo. Eventually he did get out of the inning, though, because Carlos Cortes does the required work, even if it takes a bit. This was his ninth appearance as a pitcher this year, which truly is remarkable given that he is indeed an outfielder by trade. But the A's get beaten by a lot a lot. In his nine appearances, Cortes has entered games in which they trailed at the time by an aggregate score of 129-20, so he gets an extraordinary amount of mop duty. He is The Other Ohtani, or at least that's how he should be marketed.  ( 21 min )

It was supposed to be a day to remember Chris Johnson, and it still can be. The NFL's all-time single-season yards leader was scheduled to be honored today by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he starred from 2008–2013, at halftime of their game against the New York Jets, for whom he played in 2014. But the Titans announced Friday that Johnson won't be able to travel to Nashville to be inducted into the team's Ring of Honor, and the ceremony will be postponed to a later date. I hope it does happen later. Johnson's appearance was canceled due to "unforeseen circumstances," and it's hard not to assume that's health-related. Johnson, 40, revealed in June on Good Morning America that he's been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disorder that is invariably fatal. It is cruel and it works quickly: The average time between onset and death is between two and four years. Johnson said he first noticed weakness in one hand in March 2025, and by the time of his GMA interview just 15 months later, he required a computerized speech-generating device that he controls with his eye movements. A few days ago, Johnson published "A Letter to My Kids" in The Players' Tribune; it felt like a goodbye. "How can a man just be perfectly healthy one day," he wrote, "running around with his kids in the yard, and then the next, your hand starts getting weak, and it just travels throughout your whole body until you can’t talk anymore?"  ( 21 min )

The truest thing about college football is that there is no such thing as being too small, too petty, or too whiny about being too small or petty. We're not being frivolously critical here despite how good doing that makes us feel; blaming people in the industry for acting out is like blaming a fish for being wet. These are simply the conditions that prevail. You simply have to learn to forget everything you ever learned about the values the sport allegedly respects and take the mess it churns every week for the entertainment value. Which is why the resumption of the Kansas-Missouri football rivalry has gone so well for everyone involved, including those of us with no meat on the grill. Missouri won Friday’s game, 38-21, but it's the 8 at the end that stuck out because that was Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz directing his team to score a needless late touchdown and in doing so sticking one last finger in the Jayhawks' eye for bringing up the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the 1850s in a pregame hype video called, in a triumph of subtlety, "Heroes and Villains": https://twitter.com/KU_Football/status/2098169671824404786  ( 23 min )

post that discusses optimizing buffer line numbering. It explains the different line numbering schemes and their relative costs. I not a big user of line numbering. I usually turn it on for the Elfeed index but hardly every use it otherwise unless I have a specific need. In particular, I hardly ever use them in code buffers because I prefer to jump to a particular construct rather than a line number, which, irrationally, always seem to me to be ephemeral. When I do use line numbers, I like absolute line numbers rather than the two types of relative numbers. That turns out to the right choice as far as efficiency is concerned but many people—including Cherti—prefer relative numbering. That can be expensive, especially for long lines, but there are some settings that can speed things up. The descriptions of those settings don’t really capture what they do and why you might prefer one value over another so Cherti’s post is especially helpful. If you’re one of the people who like having your buffers numbered in one way or another, take a look at Cherti’s post to see how to get the best possible performance for your choice of representation.  ( 5 min )

Tags: emacs  ( 2 min )

submitted by /u/DerekL1963 [link] [comments]

céad míle fáilte — now get the fuck out

So many anarchist principles seems like they would “never work”… because they literally cannot under capitalism, but would work just fine under a different system. One really good example of that is abolishing patents. Patents are silly, actually A patent says a person or company legally owns “an idea” or way of doing things, and no one else can use that idea or approach for many years. If you think about it for a bit, that seems really silly, doesn’t it?  ( 21 min )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | September 13, 2026  ( 9 min )

When Guns N’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction in 1987, there was little reason to believe it would become  ( 22 min )

Disco had one of the most dramatic rises and falls in popular music history. For a genre whose period  ( 31 min )

There are bad albums, and then there is Metal Machine Music. Bad albums usually fail in recognizable ways. The  ( 30 min )

It is difficult to think of another band that changed the sound of modern music as profoundly as Kraftwerk.  ( 27 min )

Bob Marley remains one of the most recognizable and influential musicians in history. His face has become an international  ( 23 min )

A protest song is more than a song with an opinion. It is music made to challenge power, mourn  ( 26 min )

There are road trip playlists, and then there are playlists that require a little self-control. The songs on this  ( 14 min )

It sounds like something invented for a ridiculous comedy sketch: a farmer puts on his work clothes, goes about  ( 9 min )

Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” is one of the defining songs of 1980s rock, a huge, emotional singalong that  ( 5 min )

wrote about the Bedrock starter kit for Emacs by Ashton Wiersdorf. Now Wiersdorf has issued a new major release of the kit. It’s mainly an update for Emacs 31 and requires that version to run. I liked his announcement and description of Bedrock 2.0 and decided to write about it on Irreal. To be honest, I’d forgotten that I’d already written about Bedrock and didn’t discover that I had until I chose the obvious name for the post source file (bedrock.org) and found that such a file already existed. You should read what I wrote before; everything from that post applies to the new version. The TL;DR is that although I don’t generally care for starter kits, I do like Wiersdorf’s because it mainly concerns itself with simple variable settings rather than configuring a bunch of packages that a user may or may not want1. His init.el is well commented to explain what everything does and some items are commented out with an explanation of why you might want to enable them. You can see the file here. If you’re looking for a simple, minimal configuration for Emacs as a starting point or you know a n00b who is, take a look at Bedrock. Footnotes: 1 There are, as with the original version, some auxiliary files that bring in some packages that Wiersdorf finds particularly useful.  ( 5 min )

The display-line-numbers-mode and global-display-line-numbers-mode modes render line numbers in the margin of an Emacs window. Line-number display is implemented in the core C display engine, avoiding the overhead of legacy Elisp overlays like linum-mode. Despite the native C implementation, and even after configuring Emacs scrolling for better usability, specific configurations can still trigger expensive Lisp evaluations during the interactive command loop, vertical scrolling, and buffer initialization. This article outlines configurations that avoid unnecessary width calculations and initialization scans. Speed comparison across line-number types The display-line-numbers-type variable specifies the type of line numbers activated by display-line-numbers-mode and global-display-line-numbe…  ( 8 min )

Watch on YouTube This is a quick demonstration of using Orukeet as a speech recognition model inside Emacs. I'm recording this in real time on a Lenovo P52 laptop using only CPU. I can replay just one part of my recording. I can switch languages in the middle of recording too. Par exemple, maintenant je parle français. Seems promising. Links/notes: oruk/orukeet · Hugging Face file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-server.py - I generated this with Google Gemini for a quick POC. It keeps the model in memory for slightly faster processing per segment. Run Orukeet locally: Python speech recognition | oruk https://oruk.ai/examples/orukeet-local.py - Python script you can run from the command line to transcribe files. file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-local.py sachac/whisper.el - my fork of natrys/whisper.el sacha-whisper-continue - This lets me cue transcriptions of previous segments while continuing to record new ones. I like it because I tend to pause while thinking out loud. I can define the chunk that will get transcribed so that I don't end up with incomplete chunks or lost context. View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I remapped yank to my command which allows to transform the yanked text. The whole setup – where I press C-y twice to trigger the transformation transient – has one drawback: I sometimes legitimately want to call yank twice in a row. This happens when I need to copy the current line and modify the copy so that I have two similar lines in a row. (I often need this when editing Ledger transactions, for example.) What I sometimes do in such a situation is basically a dance of C-a C-1 C-k C-y C-y. It turns out I don’t need to.  ( 2 min )

Donny snoozes on 9/11, MAGA loses its way to heaven, and so much more...

Drinks with Eggleston A couple days at a cottage was good for me. Never opened the laptop once. But then, I come home home, fire up the computer, and immediately regret it. I may just stop talking about the software and services I use, lest I'm suddenly labeled a supporter of fascism because one of them turns out to be built by an asshole or is friends with an asshole or once shared a quote by said asshole. Or maybe I'll quit the whole fucking show. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

I guess brainwashing is a funny thing.  ( 80 min )

Thank God we’re still in good standing with the World Health Organization ... oh wait.  ( 62 min )

I’ve spent a day test-driving that Emacs minor mode for spellchecking using an LLM that I wrote the other day. I went through all the posts on the Total Eclipse blog (all 260 of them) to see whether the thing works or not. And, yes, it works now, but it took some tweaking. Well, I rewrote the mode. Twice. My original approach was to give the LLM the entire text, and then ask it to return it to me verbatim, but with changed words tagged up specially. This worked 90% of the time, but it would randomly decide to do something else… and I was never totally sure that it actually returned the entire text. That approach was a bit too nerve-racking. But Sacha Chua has done something along similar lines, and her approach is to ask the LLM to return just the changed parts: That sounds like a mu…  ( 6 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. Ray: With all the braying about the blessed return of football games this past week, all by people who should be constantly monitored for their protection and ours, we note that while there were many games there was only some football. So far this season, ranked teams have beaten unranked teams by an aggregate score of 1,085-241, which is an average score of 45-10. (We are omitting the Mississippi-Louisville game since both teams were ranked and therefore treated the opener like the event it should be.) All the ranked teams won, with the neon green asterisk being Michigan. Now we will ignore the elephantine questions of who got fired at Kalshi after paying out on Western Michigan bets, and who is the guiltiest party in the swindling of those deeply screwed Kalamazoomers. It has been six days since the discovery of the Big Ten's Mystery Clock, and in a culture like college football's, where cheating can be the difference between the Bluebonnet and Peach Bowls, most outrages this obvious barely last three days, let alone six. Instead, we will note that three games last weekend were delayed by the bestial weather and a fourth, between the Colorado School of Mines Orediggers and Washburn Ichabods, became the first tie game in 31 years because even after starting the game early to avoid a heat index figure straight from Satan's colon, the two schools went into overtime and couldn't finish. And really, can you pick a favorite between Orediggers and Ichabods? Anyway, let the sad tales commence.  ( 43 min )

Britt McHenry, a former Fox host and ESPN reporter best known for a towing yard tirade, says she’s taken a job with the Trump administration. McHenry took to social media on Wednesday to confirm that she’d been hired as a “press advisor” for the U.S. Department of State. Her announcement, which was first reported by Barrett Media, included vague details about what her duties will be. She said she would be developing "strategies to address media concerns and enhance public understanding of State Department initiatives" on her updated LinkedIn page. But McHenry did say she’s "beyond excited" about working for Marco Rubio.  It's unclear what part of McHenry's résumé makes her a good fit for the State Department. The tiny and harmful secretary of state has gotten recent attention for hiring folks who’ve been caught on video being assholes. If that's an attribute Rubio's indeed after, McHenry made an unbeatable audition tape more than a decade ago. In fact, should McHenry somehow go on to broker an end to the Iran fiasco, negotiate a truce in the Ukraine war, and formulate some sort of McHenry Doctrine that ushers in an era of world peace, here’s betting that her obituary would still lead off with what a loathsome bully she was in the spring of 2015 at a Northern Virginia towing yard.  ( 24 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we welcomed back million-time guest Giri Nathan to talk primarily about his experience covering the U.S. Open. How bad is the phone situation? How does the memetic object of the Honey Deuce explain the current predicament? What's been the match of the tournament? We also touched on the biggest NBA news story of the past week, as well as the fallout from the NBA's hammer-style punishment of the Clippers. 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 )

On Sept. 10, ProPublica published a story by reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts detailing how Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder Oneil Cruz avoided prosecution after a traffic collision in the Dominican Republic in which he rear-ended a motorcycle, killing all three passengers. The crash occurred in Cruz's hometown of Nizao in the Peravia province, on Sept. 21, 2020; at the time, Cruz was 21 years old and still a prospect. While an initial press release from the public prosecutor's office stated that "according to investigations, the accused had ingested alcoholic beverages prior to the accident," prosecutors never raised the subject of either alcohol or intoxication at Cruz's arraignment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from five days after the crash reported on the discrepancy, with a spokeswoman from the public prosecutor's office stating that Cruz "smelled of alcohol," but due to a "procedural error," no official sobriety tests were performed. By the time Cruz was called up to the Pirates' big-league squad for the first time in 2021, the story was broadly forgotten. Garcia-Roberts's story details how Cruz came to face no charges related to the incident. Garcia-Roberts spoke to the families of the victims—19-year-old Daniela Perez Garcia, 20-year-old Deby Beato Charles, and 20-year-old Yohan Saba Mercado—all of whom withdrew their charges. According to his reporting, Cruz's family, while he was still in custody, reached out to Dominican businessman Santo Caraballo as a fixer, on the advice of a trainer. Caraballo, who had political connections, reportedly helped persuade the families of all the victims to accept a cash payment in exchange for withdrawing any legal claims against Cruz. In interviews, each family details the emotional fallout, and how they accepted the payments, which totaled roughly $66,000, due either to deceit, financial pressure, or pragmatism.  ( 20 min )

The power of a well and oft-told narrative is not to be diminished, but it also should not be feared if countervailing information comes to light. And so it is that the San Francisco 49ers, irradiated scoundrels though they may be and summer vacation wastrels they absolutely proved to be, came up with the one enduring rebuttal to all the amused schadenfreude that has been aimed their way. Specifically, they answered it with a comprehensive kicking of that arse. The 49ers put that indisputably goofy offseason all the way behind them—for a week, anyway—by taking the preseason Super Bowl favorite Los Angeles Rams and choke-slamming them and their national reputations on an Aussie Rules ground, 27-7. People made a point of saying afterward that this was the worst opening-game loss by a preseason championship favorite in 50 years, and it was. What this tells us is that all pregame gambling information, like almost all pregame information, has only one utility: to bait degenerates into spending money in defense of or repudiation of that information. The football stuff, by contrast, takes care of itself. The Rams, whose preseason standing was somewhere between consensus pick and indomitable favorite, never came close to proving it on Thursday. The score, for what it's worth, was probably a flattery to the Rams. The whompage was evident everywhere.  ( 23 min )

The NFL is built on parity. The middle exudes a tremendous gravitational force, with the schedule, the draft, and the salary cap all conspiring to pull every team toward 9-8 or 8-9 records year after year. While the larger-order churn of the league hews to that pattern, a number of teams have found ways to consistently defy the schematic, either by consistently posting winning records or failing to take advantage of the considerable structural help built into the way the NFL is organized. But why? What makes these organizations capable of resisting the pull of the middle? Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg ask these questions in their new book, The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL, which is available now. This is the Wall Street Journal duo's fourth book together, and it's the product of a year of reporting and research. On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with Robinson about the book's arguments, what makes team-building in the NFL so fascinating, and his and Clegg's co-writing process. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  ( 35 min )

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a New York Times feature about the possibility of an 18-month nationwide blackout. I was uneasy seeing the phrase “art form” used to describe the archaic manufacturing process of the transformers that underpin our electrical grid; the process involves painstakingly bespoke techniques of winding copper coils, wrapping paper insulation, and binding wiring, all by hand. The intensity and intricacy of that process means that there is a backlog of transformer manufacturing and repair, sometimes stretching as long as five years. There are more than 55,000 substations in the United States, but according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commissio…  ( 31 min )

The quality of the average tennis broadcast has skyrocketed in recent years. Analysts assume far more curiosity and intelligence on the viewer’s part than I can ever remember, and they're no longer limited to tropes and cliches, recycled set after set. Instead the television audience receives tasty morsels of granular observation. Sure, you might still have to deal with a certain American legend entering the booth and freshly learning about the existence of any player ranked below No. 12, but a lot of bright minds are on the mic now, working hard to elucidate the game. Recently retired players like Andrea Petkovic and Chris Eubanks mesh wit with analysis, and former greats Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick get shockingly nitty-gritty about stroke production and point patterns. I feel heartened that some sizable audience cares about this stuff, and that networks like ESPN, TNT, and Tennis Channel have decided it’s worth investing in. My current favorite commentator is Jim Courier, the former world No. 1 and four-time major champ, whose stateside employers are Tennis Channel and TNT, where he is especially adept at interpreting the interplay of variables in every tennis match: conditions, technique, tactics, fitness. You'll learn something new every time you hear him on the call. This past Monday at the Open, I sat down with Courier to talk about how he sees tennis, in hopes that it would help other fans see it better. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  ( 44 min )

Name an iconic scene from the first Spider-Man movie, the one directed by Sam Raimi that came out in 2002. You’re saying it’s the upside-down kiss? Yeah, that’s fair. Let me ask my question in a different way: What’s the most iconic line from the first Spider—OK now that I’m saying it out loud, it’s definitely “With great power comes great responsibility.” Which I know is not a creation of the film but it did popularize it and … we’re already getting off-topic. Let me try this again: Hey, remember the part in the middle of Spider-Man that’s about 9/11?  ( 36 min )

As you’ll see to the right (if you’re on a desktop or laptop) David Kurtz has a good run-down of...  ( 6 min )

We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Joseph diGenova ... Todd Blanche ... Donald Trump

and abuses another woman reporter, too

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 )

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 )

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 )