2026-07-18 03:15:32
On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more of the agents fired at least six shots, at least four of which went through the windshield. As recorded on eyewitness video, the agents then pulled Durán Guerrero's limp body from the car and shackled his wrists. He did not survive.
This killing—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigrant death squads have committed in the U.S. since the start of Donald Trump's crackdown—has been met with public outrage, but nothing indicates that the federal government thinks anything went wrong at all. As is its custom, ICE told lies about its victim, calling Durán Guerrero an "illegal alien" in its statement and suggesting that agents slaughtered the unarmed man in front of his toddler daughter due to the threat he posed to public safety.
Friday morning, the Associated Press published a lengthy story about the individual ICE agent believed to have fired the fatal shots. David Brouillette is 37 years old and, according to members of his own family who spoke to the AP, has been a known danger to the people around him for virtually his entire life. A long trail of family-court records portrays him as a violent, unhinged abuser of his former spouses and children, a stalker and harasser, a serial loser of jobs. A telling detail in the AP's story is that when in 2025 Brouillette told an ex-wife that he'd gotten a job with ICE, she assumed that he was, in the AP's wording, "having a mental health episode," and continued believing that was the case until she found out this week that he'd killed a man. Whether because of the kind of guy she knew him to be or because of assumptions she held about the U.S. government or both, the idea that she was hearing psychotic raving struck her as more plausible than that a federal agency had agreed to give her former abuser a badge and a gun.
2026-07-18 01:06:41
James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade.
The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists.
Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled "Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities." The piece went into detail about the owner's fetish for keeping tabs on many of the Garden's famous visitors.
2026-07-17 23:51:48
There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate, that May interview was "testy," and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team's stupid Pride Night meltdown. So his return to the show Thursday was a bit of a delicate matter. It did not go well.
Posey is a huge drag on the radio. The Giants stink, and as the architect of this mess, Posey is probably not in a great mood these days. What's particularly deflating is his way of inflecting his voice so that it sounds like he's just speaking plain truths, just being square with you, and then you listen closely to what he's saying and there's just nothing of substance to it. It's like listening to a lecture on home warranties, but somehow delivered in platitudes, by Eeyore.
During the show's middle segment, Posey was asked to evaluate his team's first-half performance and to share his impressions of what has gone right and what has gone wrong so far this season. The Giants are presently 41–55, fourth in their division and third from the bottom in the National League. They are a plodding, weary, strikingly juiceless team: The Giants are last in walks and stolen bases, but don't do nearly enough slugging to make up for it, and as a consequence have scored fewer runs than all but one NL team. Also, they have the league's third-worst fielding percentage. Hell, while we're here, Giants rookie skipper Tony Vitello has the National League's worst overturn percentage among managers. It's a bad baseball team.
2026-07-17 23:08:18
The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is famously good at parenting. In the leaf litter of forests around the United Kingdom, the beetles scurry around in search of the small carcasses of mice and birds. Once the beetles find a suitable corpse, they get to work. First they strip the carcass of its fur or feathers and disembowel it. Then they smear it with brownish-red antimicrobial fluid. Finally, they roll the flesh into a ball and bury it in the sand. Once under the soil, the corpse is ready to become a nursery for the beetle's offspring—a putrefying rat refurbished into an artisanal crib. (Here is a photo of one such crib, if your curiosity is piqued.)
A nursery needs babies, and so the beetles must also get to a different kind of work. By this I mean the beetles must mount each other. If you are having trouble imagining this, please enjoy the art below.
2026-07-17 22:20:49
Here's how we got on this: Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub. He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts.
Giri Nathan
The only movie I've ever walked out of was Kazaam. If I remember correctly, I told my mom I had to go pee, and then after that we simply decided not to go back inside. I think even at that age I clocked it as irredeemable. The angriest I've ever been at a movie while sitting in a theater was Rise of Skywalker. I left with plumes of steam coming out of my ears.
2026-07-17 21:02:10
Like every previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories. The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage success of the African teams, and most memorably by Cape Verde. You also had the tactical story of the tournament, in how the teams with the most fluid and attractive attacking play achieved it by eschewing the sport's dominant strategic meta—the spread-'em-wide-and-pin-'em-high positional gambit, which has grown boring to watch and increasingly easy for defenses to counteract—to instead bring players closer together, looking to create space through spontaneous movement, collaboration, and deception, producing unpredictable moves full of technical inventiveness that baffled opponents and dazzled spectators. The exemplars of this refreshing brand of free-flowing soccer were Morocco and Colombia (honorable mentions go to the group-stage versions of Argentina and the United States), and in particular the brief but extraordinary cameos of Colombian cult favorite, Juan Fernando Quintero.
Then there was the anti-VAR story. It doesn't require belief in the more fanciful conspiracies about FIFA rigging the tournament in favor of Argentina to appreciate all the ways VAR has made the game worse. To wit, it has dulled the emotional impact of what should be moments of explosive sentiment, has made it so that the key replays after goals are no longer the best angles of amazing strikes but rather freeze-frames of back lines so that you can guess whether review will deem someone offside by an eyebrow, and overall has created conditions that only exacerbate the sense of inconsistency, suspicion, and unfairness that the replay system was meant to eliminate. Breel Embolo's red card against Argentina was the nadir, a call that by the letter of the new, confusing law may have been correct, but that violated any conceivable notion of justice.
So yes, over the course of a long tournament, especially during the early, most entertaining stage, the World Cup offers a rich variety of stories, all of them worthwhile in their own right. But as the competition winds toward its conclusion, the World Cup always returns to its principal theme: that the only thing that truly matters in soccer is having the best of the best.
