McSweeney’s
• Rebecca Schiff and Sam Axelrod
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
• 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 […]
Andor Gave Us One Of TV’s Best Monologues
Defector
• Joshua Kendall
“Awfulness For Decades”: A Short History Of Trump And Doonesbury
Ancestral Genomes
Defector
• Abigail Segel
The Denver Summit May Not Be Good, But They Sure Are Fun
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:
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.
#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.
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
• 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
• Defector Staff
There Is A Whole World In ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.’
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.”
ChatGPT images, two years apart
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.
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The Texas Observer
• 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
• Kathryn Xu
How I Became An Itinerant Cat Tutor
Defector
• Billy Haisley
Barcelona Wins The Crown But Loses The Queen
Defector
• Ray Ratto
The Tragedy Of Appreciating SOBs Too Late