The 2026 World Cup has been absolutely wild, filled with matches that have remained thrilling right up to the final whistle (e.g., Argentina vs. Cape Verde). And then there was what happened to the U.S. men’s team, which was building momentum until Folarin Balogun’s red card and Trump’s intervention.
[T]he U.S. loss kinda felt like Trump’s fault. Sports teams seem to wither under the president’s touch. (Remember when he went to the NBA Finals and fell asleep? That was the only game the Knicks, his team, dropped in that series.) The vibes had been so immaculate when we were romping 3-1 past Paraguay — a pretty good team, as it turned out! — and shutting out Australia 2-0 and winning our group. The conversation had been so euphoric when we hung on with 10 men to beat Bosnia-Herzegovina 2-0 in the round of 32, the match that featured the first of those miraculous Tillman free kicks. And then, in two minutes, the president turned the USMNT’s all-time run into a hotbed of shouting and controversy. While it may simply be a coincidence, the gang certainly played on Monday like a team surrounded by shouting and controversy rather than by happiness. They played tense. They played like a team that felt utterly engulfed in the discourse. Being engulfed in discourse can sometimes be an advantage in sports — us against the world, stick it to the haters, etc. — but it’s hard to switch to defiance on a dime when you’ve spent four straight games having flowers strewn at your feet.
I do feel for the USMNT. They were put in a tough spot by Trump’s intervention, and had they won, there would’ve been an asterisk next to their victory for the rest of human history. Maybe that pressure got to them, because for whatever reason, the team that played Belgium was not the same team we’d seen in the preceding games.
For what it’s worth, I’m now fully onboard with Erling Haaland and the Norwegian team, even against my motherland, England. Haaland et al. simply look like they’re having the most fun out there on the pitch.
The International Olympic Committee has recommended lifting the three-year suspension on Russia for the 2028 LA Games.
The move was expected since the International Olympic Committee advised two months ago that athletes from Belarus, Russia's military ally in the full military invasion of Ukraine, should be allowed again to compete with their full national identity.
[…]
The IOC did not yet approve letting Russian athletes and teams compete with their flag and anthem. That decision will come "at an appropriate time," it said.
Rumors are swirling that this decision could lead to a mass European boycott of the LA games.
Jeffrey Zeldman warns against relying on online services (i.e., “the cloud”) to save our important memories.
We used to worry about fire. A house fire could claim the photo albums, the letters, the dusty box of cassette tapes in the closet. We knew exactly what we were protecting, and from what. The threat was not only visible, but olfactory: you could smell smoke.
Now the threat is something else entirely: not loss through destruction, but loss through indifference. The server shuts down. The startup pivots. The platform “sunsets” a feature you’d spent years filling with memories. And just like that, a decade of your life becomes a page of 404s.
I turned 50 this year and Opus turns 30 next year, which has started me thinking about what it might take to archive and preserve Opus long-term.
Microsoft recently laid off 4,800 employees, including 1,600 folks in its games division, which will face another 1,600 layoffs in the next year or so. The move affected several of Microsoft’s in-house game studios, which are responsible for some of the platform’s biggest titles.
Current and former employees who spoke to Aftermath anonymously, as they were not authorized to speak publicly, identified several places where the scythe struck grievous blows: Zenimax (which includes Starfield and Elder Scrolls maker Bethesda Game Studios), Doom mainstay id Software, the quietly ultra-prolific Obsidian, and Activision. Zenimax, according to several, has seen many teams halved (or more), leaving the future of Elder Scrolls Online in flux. Bethesda Game Studios, meanwhile, has lost dozens of employees. In Zenimax and BGS’ case, especially, LinkedIn posts paint a grim picture, with over 50 publicly saying that they’ve lost their jobs since the day began. Some worked there for only a couple years; others nearly 20.
The layoffs highlight just how precarious the video game industry is right now, especially for workers who already deal with crazy deadlines, intense work schedules, fan expectations, and a host of other pressures.
Related: id Software is the studio behind the iconic Doom franchise, as well as a host of other classics. But this recent round of layoffs could be a death knell for the company.
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo recently sold for a record $3 million at auction.
Bearing the coveted gloss sticker adopted in early 1986, it is the earliest confirmed sealed copy of the most important game cartridge in history. It is one of only three known sealed copies from this second-production run — a variant that has never appeared in a public auction in sealed condition. Of the three known sealed copies, this is the finest, with a PSA 9.6 A++ grade. The others are VGA 80 and Wata 9.4 A++.
Via Kottke.
The game was found inside a Control Deck NES console bundle and hadn’t been touched in nearly 40 years.
The 2026 Emmy nominees have been announced, with The Pitt and Hacks leading the nominations. Fingers crossed, however, for Slow Horses and Gary Oldman. The awards ceremony will air on NBC and Peacock on September 14, 2026, and will be hosted by Law & Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay, who will be the first woman to host the ceremony in 15 years.
Marc Sims examines the philosophy of Backrooms, which began as a series of YouTube videos and has since become one of the year’s biggest movies, horror or otherwise.
As a Christian, I find movies and stories that expose the price of postmodernism to be both deeply unsettling and when done well, (as Backrooms is) deeply satisfying. It is similar to reading Friedrich Nietzsche or early French existentialists. Here we have someone who is willing to pay the full fare of a materialist worldview with total honesty, even if the cost is agonizing to the mind. It is a bracing slap of reality against the cheery atheism of those who celebrate God’s death without realizing the price of unchaining the earth from the sun.
Americans are reading less and less, writes Rose Horowitch, and we’re not fully prepared for the effects that lower literacy rates might have on our culture.
In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
Via NextDraft.
O. Alan Noble worries what Google’s AI-generated summaries are doing to our sense of curiosity.
When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we knew to look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us to discover interesting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.
Finally, Alan Siegel sings the praises of Costco’s hot dog, which was introduced in the ’80s and still costs a mere $1.50 even after all this time.
In a world where the McDonald’s Dollar Menu is long gone, a 7-Eleven dog costs over $2, and it’s a challenge to stay on budget at Taco Bell, the Costco frank stands alone. It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.
Via 1440.
From the Blog
I’m always impressed and fascinated by the ever-growing list of blogging platforms, and I’m particularly interested in several platforms that are running on the AT Protocol, the same protocol that powers Bluesky. Between these platforms and several others that I’ve highlighted in the past, there’s really never been a better time to start blogging and take control of your online experience.
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