True!

Isn't this just the Andrew Miller model from 2016? And isn't that... fine?

I honestly feel like we should have left the hair-splitting over the Capital C "closer" role behind a long time ago. You have your best reliever, you use them in the highest leverage, and sometimes that's in the ninth.

Not wrong, but: how much of this difference is mostly just about the collapse of traditional mass marketing?

The message in 1999 was 100% “you need a cell phone” but that message feels very different delivered via TV commercials and print ads vs versus the corporate PR/integration campaigns of now.

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

The big question Speechless fails to answer is “Why is this generation of students pushing against traditional ‘liberal’ modes of discourse and engagement?” That takes unpacking the failures of liberalism to address our social, political and economic realities — and on that, Speechless is silent.

It diagnoses the central issue very early in its first half — the complicating of the traditional liberal model of higher education — but is more interested in humanizing the people impacts (both fair and problematic) than in trying to understand and explain how and why this is happening, sadly.

There’s good stuff buried in Speechless, the big CBC-promoted doc about campus political issues… but the fact pretty much every person on one side of the debate seems to end up readily and willingly going on Fox News showcases — at a minimum — a woeful lack of practical political awareness.

kinda funny how Republican voters are inarguably happier when a Dem is president. they don’t actually want to be in charge of shit, they want to roll coal and whip themselves into a frenzy over wholly imaginary liberal tyranny. now they’ve caught the car and it fuckin sucks

JD Vance saying the Pope doesn't understand Catholic doctrine and Pierre Poilievre saying Mark Carney is badly educated in economics are attack lines from the same "hilariously misapplied hubris" part of the modern conservative brain.

If there's a late-career Swift song that feels like a standard to me, it might be "Lover"?

This was going to be my answer, though that might be based on my definition of "standard" as a song that translates to other artists performing them. As great as her late career work often has been, the songs have become much more textually ABOUT Taylor Swift in a way that makes them tough to travel

Viktor Orbán created the global blueprint for authoritarian populism and became a MAGA hero. Today, Hungarian voters sent him packing after 16 years in power.

There is nothing inevitable about these guys. Organize. Vote. Fight back. It works.

A series of posts from journalist Mark Chadbourn reporting on the acceptance speech of Péter Magyar after Hungarian elections: Péter Magyar: "Our country wants to live again. It wants to be a European country again." Mark Chadbourn• @chadbourn.bsky.social • 24m Magyar's speech is powered. From a contact in the audience: "He's basically just asked all the puppets, all the supreme justices, all the heads of media, all the heads of the ministries to leave their jobs tomorrow and not wait to be fired." •.. Mark Chadbourn• @chadbourn.bsky.social • 22m He's announced that Hungary will join the European Prosecution Office so anyone in the country can be charged. Mark Chadbourn• @chadbourn.bsky.social • 21m Magyar: "No mercy, they will need to take responsibility for all their actions." ... Mark Chadbourn• @chadbourn.bsky.social • 20m Magyar says he's starting work with the EU and NATO immediately. "The EU doesn't have to worry anymore."

From new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar's acceptance speech tonight. This is the absolute BARE MINIMUM platform for any Democrat running for President in 2028.

(To be clear, the lesson is, “Avoid a like-vs-like final by placing them on the same side of the bracket.)

Let this be a teachable moment in bracket construction to all potential bracketeers.

I like this because it articulates the conservative concept of freedom in a nutshell. You have the freedom to do x, except you don't, because I don't want you to. bsky.app/profile/atru...

Mamdani, Houston and Fillmore all seem deeply invested in “content production” as part of their leadership.

Difference is: Mamdani’s model posits that helpful, engaging content can be politically helpful, whereas Houston and Fillmore appear mostly interested in content for politics’ sake.

Truly interesting, detailed, super journalist’d long read from Chris here

Dedra Meero from Andor in prison

Checking in on Pam Bondi:

Today I was in a large meeting where a woman announced “I’m sorry, I have to leave, I just got a call that I’ve got a family doctor” and the room CHEERED like she’d won $10 million dollars. What a joyous, dystopian moment.

I also enjoy how the way to make tolls sound bad to people used to be by calling them “taxes,” but post-Trump they’ve switched to “tariffs” as the worst imaginable word. 🤣

And we have a highway (104 - Cobequid Pass section) that has a “tariff” (toll) on New Brunswickers. How is this any different?

Not quite! Children innocent - they only commit murder when entirely warranted.

Same vibes.

Say what you will about "say what you will" social media posts, but...

Say what you will about Southland Tales (a mess) or The Box (70% mess, 30% secretly great?), but those movies are never, for one moment, boring.

1) Say what you will about JJ Abrams productions, but they sure as shit know how to "movie trailer." Hopes placed with this one.
2) I really, really wish we'd find a way to break Richard Kelly out of director jail.

I had a lot of beef with that movie, but not with him. He’s got lots of charm. And his performance on the criminally underwatched Station Eleven was incredible.

Literally just heat at every turn on this project let’s goooooo