📥 John Heilemann: Why I Joined Puck — Puck

Nice to see Heilemann end up with a column at Puck now that The Circus has been cancelled.

🔗 Plinky

Another really nifty looking link saving app. $40 a year, given other apps out there like Raindrop, is a bit steep, but I’m considering it…

🗳️ Boris Johnson turned away from polling station without proper ID — FT

Boris Johnson was turned away from his polling station in England on Thursday, as the former UK prime minister fell foul of voter identification rules he pushed for in government

You couldn’t write it any better.

🐂 The Chicago Bulls broke up with their diehard fans long ago. It’s on the fans to realize it. — Sporting News

In spite of themselves, the Bulls still lead the league every year in home attendance. Fans love their team even when they hate it. While many of the ones that I speak to have stopped watching religiously, they still follow closely. They can’t quit the habit.

Until then, they’re thrilled to be the Applebees of the NBA.

It hurts, but it’s true. I barely even watched this season, but was still checking in constantly…

🌐 Sphere Is the Mind-Killer — The Atlantic

Unlike U2, who played a similar list of songs each night, set to the same visualizations, Phish’s challenge was essentially to get the $2 billion architectural marvel to jam in sync with the band. In interviews, Anastasio described a painstaking process of planning and rehearsal, layering in Easter eggs and brain-melting visuals that might be enough to make a Phish diehard experiencing their 300th show feel like they’re seeing something new.

Their first night at the Sphere was my third Phish show so I’m not huge Phish fan, but my cousin, who brought me, has been to a ton and went 3/4 nights and said the Sunday show was the best show he’s ever seen.

🏀 NBC Prepares $2.5-Billion-a-Year Bid to Pluck NBA Rights From TNT — WSJ

Will be wild if TNT/WB really get left out completely. Even more so if NBC steals Chuck or the rest of the TNT crew.

🐴 The Browser for Research — Horse Browser

I bookmarked this awhile back so it’s probably old news… Just bought it on a whim though… gotta stop browsing late at night… it’s cool though.

🤖 Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher — 404

“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don’t respect the written word,” Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don’t even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”

Reason #854 that AI makes me depressed. I’m not actually familiar with Bards and Sages, but as someone with a submission form, I’ve been worried about this from the start.

👽 Welcome to Wrex-Files

It always feels weird posting promotional material, but Ryan Reynolds is just so damn good at it.

🎉 Weekend Edition Vol.020 — Foofaraw

Killer issue went out yesterday with a new album review and short story. If you haven’t updated your RSS feed from Buttondown to Ghost, now’s as good a time as any.

🤖 Microsoft and Alphabet enjoy AI-powered gains from cloud divisions — FT

Microsoft’s Azure offering “is the only software business that is benefiting from AI at this point in the cycle”, said Brad Sills, research analyst at Bank of America. “Microsoft remains ahead of the curve in this massive new cycle.”

💰 Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever — The Onion

Already, our trained technicians are navigating through the website and deleting every instance of the letter “T.” Soon, they will move onto the letter “E.”

I gave ’em a buck 😝🤷‍♂️ See also: NYT

🌐 You can finally bring Arc everywhere? — Arc Sync for iOS

I literally just deleted Arc Search from my phone… one reason was because I wanted my tabs to sync… 🤦‍♂️

🔥 The Heat Beat Boston At Its Own Game — Defector

It wasn’t just the threes, though he made six of 11 attempts in a game Miami probably had to win to have any hope of actually pulling off an upset in this series. He also ran the offense, finding open shooters and cutters all over the place for 14 assists.

and generally played a calming role.

It’s the “calming role” that really surprises me. Oh and the fact Miami is back in this same position, without Jimmy Butler, and part of me thinks they actually have a shot to pull off another upset.

🥁 The Heart of Low — New Yorker

The band’s music demands patience and attention, which it repays in beauty and transcendence, punctuated by occasional bursts of earworm jangle-pop or cathartic, pummelling storms of noise.

I only really got into Low with their last album—even still—I was devastated to hear of Parker’s passing. Optimistic for what comes next from Sparhawk.

👯‍♀️ Mary Wellesley: Gurle Talk — LRB

I’m trying out getting the LRB in print (I love their print format!) and really enjoyed this piece on language.

🤠 Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other by Orville Peck & Willie Nelson

Gold. Pure gold. Everything about this is top notch. Especially Willie Nelson. And there’s something about “frequently secretly” that feels nice.

🎸 Going Home by Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes

Haven’t been keeping up with links, but I had to make an exception. An amazing collective of guitarists and the video highlights each person’s name as they play so you can pick out their sound. Incredible. Probably Jeff Beck’s last recording too.

If you ended up here via Ben’s [SIC], consider checking out my newsletter, foofaraw.

🧑‍🔬 Welcome to Sequencer

Another exciting co-op media company, this one is “a digital science magazine and newsletter run by four journalists whose writing covers all corners of science, the lives affected by it, the people doing it, and the craft of writing about it.” I’m going to need to create a database to track all of these sites.

🐻 What the Keenan Allen trade means for the Bears offense and the No. 9 pick — Athletic

More Bears… I wonder how Allen feels now that he’s going to have a rookie QB.