Sign up

McSweeney’s
Text • Rebecca Schiff and Sam Axelrod

Writers

Writers have problems. Writers win prizes. Writers play ping-pong, think other writers are their friends. Writers write baseball novels. Writers write war novels. Writers write about the South. Writers make music. Writers draw. Writers take pictures of their desks. Writers s...

blog.lmorchard.com Supports Webmention
Text

A whole fake season of Star Trek (Week 22)

TL;DR: A week that felt like nothing but Star Trek shitposts. Underneath that: two videos about being a nervous introvert, a serious darkwave bender, and an unreasonable craving for a Junji Ito horror-manga cardigan. About on brand, honestly.

Platformonomics
Text • Charles Fitzgerald

Platformonomics TGIF #128: May 29, 2026

Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email 50-50 chance of a newsletter next week. Might be too busy preparing for the Cleveland visit. Still waiting to hear whether Seattle’s Mayor and Washington’s Governor are […]

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Andor Gave Us One Of TV’s Best Monologues

Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto: Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. And Kino Loy’s speech to his fello...

Defector
Text • Joshua Kendall

“Awfulness For Decades”: A Short History Of Trump And Doonesbury

“Awfulness For Decades”: A Short History Of Trump And Doonesbury
The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now. In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentiall...

xkcd.com
Text

Ancestral Genomes

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: No further research is needed as it is frankly none of our business.

Defector
Text • Abigail Segel

The Denver Summit May Not Be Good, But They Sure Are Fun

The Denver Summit May Not Be Good, But They Sure Are Fun
There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course, are they any good?  It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Sin...

Eugen Rochko Valid
Text

The studio release sounds so big, so bombastic, so sonically elaborate that I think had I heard it for the first time this way, I would've connected to it immediately despite the irregular structure. Basically:

Eugen Rochko Valid
Text

When I first heard it last year, I had a hard time connecting with it at first. It's not a traditional album in the sense of, well, having individual songs that you could play in isolation if so desired. It's like a whole piece, with flowing themes and motifs. It was through repeat listening that I was able to see through it.

Eugen Rochko Valid
Text

#DevinTownsend's new album #TheMoth is out today. Deluxe Edition consists of the studio version and the raw orchestra & choir performance ("The Afterlife"). I saw the live debut performance last year on livestream and though I liked it back then already, with proper mixing it sounds absolutely phenomenal.

Manton Reece Supports Webmention Valid
Text

Seriously underestimated how long this db migration was going to take, leading to a deployment blunder that introduced a temporary cross-posting glitch. I’ve been juggling too much this week, making careless mistakes. Getting a lot done, though!

Six Colors Updates instantly via WebSub Valid
Text • Jason Snell

New colors for the iPhone 18 Pro? ↦

9to5Mac reports on an X post from a “reliable source” that provides some new images of the four colors rumored to be available on the iPhone 18 Pro:

A new set of iPhone 18 Pro dummy units is giving us our best look yet at the all-new colors Apple has planned for this year.

…

Defector
Text • Defector Staff

There Is A Whole World In ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.’

There Is A Whole World In ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.’
From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives litt...

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy...

Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy in which “every one of the ~550,000 words in Infinite Jest [is replaced] with ‘Jeff’ while preserving punctuation, line breaks, etc.”

Scripting News Valid
Text

ChatGPT images, two years apart

On May 29, 2024 I asked ChatGPT to: "draw a picture of a baseball game at Citifield in the style of an American master artist." Drawing from 2024. I asked the same question today. Drawing from 2026, patterned after the art of George Bellows (chosen by ChatGPT).

Fresh Air
Audio

Remembering jazz giant Sonny Rollins

The great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins died Monday at the age of 95. He was known for his improvisation and technique, his full bodied sound that could erupt into grunts and brays, and his love of songs. Rollins said of improvising: “When I'm actually on the stage and performing, the optimum condition is not to think. I just want the music to play itself. I didn't want to have to think about it.” We listen back to Terry Gross’s 1994 interview with Rollins. Also, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead pays tribute. 

Finally, critic Justin Chang tells us about the highlights from the Cannes Film Festival. 


See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

The Texas Observer
Text • Gus Bova

‘La Causa’ Continues in South Texas

Like everyone else, the César Chávez revelations shocked us, maybe more so than others since we had worked with him for almost two decades.  The stunning news did not just deliver a gut-punch betrayal but also immediate anxiety about the damage that the exposé of his dark side would do to the movement, to all […]

The post ‘La Causa’ Continues in South Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Defector Valid
Text • Kathryn Xu

How I Became An Itinerant Cat Tutor

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a t...

Defector Valid
Text • Billy Haisley

Barcelona Wins The Crown But Loses The Queen

Barcelona Wins The Crown But Loses The Queen
This past Saturday, Barcelona Femení met OL Lyonnes in the Champions League final and crushed them by a score of 4-0. The scoreline was a little misleading, but only a little. On one hand, the first half of the match tilted heavily in Lyon's favor. The French team put their ...

Defector Valid
Text • Ray Ratto

The Tragedy Of Appreciating SOBs Too Late

The Tragedy Of Appreciating SOBs Too Late
The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of ...