Ahead of the World Cup’s Round of 16, President Donald Trump literally interfered with the U.S. team’s run as he called FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and argued for a controversial red card to be reviewed. And, on Sunday, as the quadrennial tournament came to its conclusion, Trump crashed the stage during the final celebration.
A few weeks ago I wrote this post about how Google, once a foundation of the open web, had shifted decisively against it by transforming search into the front end of a chatbot. Now the Times has a piece that examines the same issue. This is usually presented as a extinction event or at least a catastrophe for publishers. It is. (It’s not for us because we were never very reliant on search.) But as I noted in that June post, there’s much more here than an issue for publishers. It’s part of the broader oligarchic moment in which a literal handful of monopoly tech platforms further entrench their monopolies, lock in ever greater profits and continue to plug that money back into to the political system they need to control to sustain and guard those profits.
Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John Waters about how he used to work at Mary Oliver’s bookstore in Provincetown. “They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun.”
A new report shows how President Donald Trump’s administration is harming state economies nationwide as several states that rely on federal government jobs and spending landed on a list of the top 10 worst economies in the nation.
And the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce are continuing to acutely impact the Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia region.
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the 14th amendment, “spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get”.
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters.
That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington. The gathering was informally called the “Antifa summit.”
Rubio described antifa-aligned networks as sharing infrastructure across borders and accused Iran and Cuba of helping bankroll the movement, without offering evidence. The White House declared the summit the start of an “unprecedented global offensive” against what it calls “radical left terrorism.”
This offensive is built on the same domestic legal architecture that has now sent American activists to prison for decades.
That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.
Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.
57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):
4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon
4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage
10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)
Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.
Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:
The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)
Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.
Tags: Apollo · Apollo 11 · Buzz Aldrin · Moon · Neil Armstrong · space · TV · Walter Cronkite
President Donald Trump posted on his favorite social media platform Monday morning, seemingly acknowledging that the entire SAVE America Act — the voter suppression bill he and his MAGA allies have been pushing Congress to pass — will not be in the third budget reconciliation bill Republicans are hoping to pass.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries.
To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.
This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.
Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa.
Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists.
Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”
So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Is there a name for this diet?
Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.
Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?
We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.
Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?
Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.
How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?
Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.”
Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?
I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.
Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.
Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?
I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.
I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
House Republicans will bring forward this week a surprising and dangerous form of the voting restriction proposals that President Trump has been relentlessly pressuring Congress to pass for months. That act may well discourage or exclude millions of voters via draconian requirements for presenting proof-of-citizenship when registering, showing rigorous voter ID at the polls, or even purging voter rolls. Previously, Trump has pushed these notorious proposals under the guise of “election integrity,” termed the “SAVE America Act,” repeatedly and loudly, and they have even passed the House. But the proposals have failed in the Senate, for lack of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster, thanks to unyielding Democratic resistance and an assist from some Senate Republicans. Trump has asked Senate Republican leadership to abolish the filibuster in order to get the legislation through, and even to fire the universally-respected Senate Parliamentarian, and has been repeatedly refused. It seemed dead. His threat is back, disguised in a new form.
I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city builder game called GlagStone.
President Trump’s mass deportation operation continues to embody all of the worst elements of his second presidency: the retribution, the destruction, and the corruption, a lawless trifecta that subjugates immigrants while eroding the rights of American citizens.
The first handful of items in today’s Morning Memo captures different aspects of the lawlessness as manifested in developments from just the past few days. It comes as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s supposedly “kinder and gentler” ICE is proving to be a short-lived election-year feint, not a real retrenchment. Two fatal ICE shootings within a week have a way of ripping away the mask.
While immigrants have borne the brunt of the Trump brutality, the administration has been eager to systematically use the powers of the state against protesters. The viciousness of the mass deportation operation has created its own feedback loop: spurring more protests which create more opportunities for the administration to crack down on dissenters. As you’ll see below, that has proven to be a very bad strategy once it gets to federal court.
Be sure to make it at least as far as the final item in the series, which is about the never-before-used Alien Terrorist Removal Court that the Trump administration tried to breathe life into last week.
In a comprehensive review of hundreds of criminal cases against ICE protesters, the New York Times found that an extraordinary number of those cases have crumbled, especially when compared to the Justice Department’s typical 90% conviction rate:
The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them. …
The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.
The FBI issued guidance to managers nationwide on Thursday that the bureau would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — although DOJ and DHS denied in a joint statement the change in policy, the NYT reports.
What’s the upshot? It’s not entirely clear.
The NYT casts the change as making it less likely that the FBI will turn up damaging evidence against immigration agents involved in confrontations with protesters, but FBI agents have been seriously constrained in their investigations since Trump’s mass deportation operation began, a point the NYT also makes: “Under the Trump administration, when ICE agents have shot and killed people, the F.B.I. has been assigned to scrutinize a narrow question: whether the agents were assaulted before the gunfire.”
So it seems at least possible that this policy shift gets the FBI out of the business of pursuing protesters at the behest of the White House — though its hard to imagine FBI Director Kash Patel having the spine to resist that kind of pressure in the future.
Stay tuned …
An employee of the contractor that runs the ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested in connection with the Thursday evening shooting of a protester outside of the detention facility.
Brandon Booth, 42, faces charges of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon in the shooting of the protester, who suffered non-fatal injuries to her lower body.
Politico crashed a boozy yacht party thrown in D.C. by the Mass Deportation Coalition that drew former GOP Reps. Steve King (IA) and Tom Tancredo (CO) and former officials from ICE and DOJ, including the pardoned coup plotter Jeffrey Clark.
ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn’t supposed to have with Palantir, according to new court filings reviewed by NPR.
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court has existed since 1996, but it was never used until last week.
Seamus Hughes of Court Watch broke the news Saturday of its first use — and the creation of a bare-bones court website.
In its first order, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court rejected for now the Trump administration’s application to remove an unidentified individual but gave it a chance to supplement the record, noting that “the Government could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration.”
The best reporting and analysis on this new development:
In a very important decision on the scope of the president’s powers to fire civil servants, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff of Alexandria, Virginia, ruled from the bench Friday that the termination of FEMA’s chief financial officer Mary Comans last year without a hearing or the chance to transfer to another job was unlawful, Politico reports.
“Well, it has — it has a lot, and you know it has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re going to send it to have it be maxed out. So they’re going to be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out.”—President Trump, apparently conceding that his beloved Qatari Force One doesn’t have all the capabilities of its predecessors (a fact reported by the NYT that led to its reporters being subpoenaed in a leak investigation)
Following up on President Trump’s inane speech on election security, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials Friday with jail time if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands to change election policies.
The Friday attack by Iran in Jordan that killed two U.S. service members and left a third missing and presumed dead was not the first attack in the country during the Iran War. At least three other Iranian attacks in Jordan in the week before the Friday attack injured dozens of American service members and damaged helicopters — but the Pentagon did not disclose those attacks or the casualties and damage they caused, the NYT reports.
Perhaps overshadowed by the final weekend of the World Cup (congrats, Spain), Britain’s Josh Kerr broke the 27-year old world record for the mile:
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I suspect like many of you, I saw The Odyssey this weekend. I really liked it and the more I read & think about the film, the more it grows in my esteem. This thread by Mmina Maclang-Tamayo (spoilers!) is pretty much how I interpreted what Nolan was trying to convey.
As it turns out, it was 10,000% important that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was delivered in American accents, beyond just the Emily Wilson linguistics of it all.
It’s because it was about America.
I didn’t think it’d be possible to spoil a 3000 year-old epic, but here’s a 🧵
The emphasis on what’s happening back in Ithaca, with the royal courts and suitors to Penelope reflect upon the internal politics of taking the anxieties of the people about external invaders to attempt to seize power.
Then, Odysseus returns with the revelation: the feared invaders, “The Sea People”, were them all along.
Zeus’ Law has an uncanny resemblance to Christian teaching. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me”. (Matthew 25:40)
That America proudly keeps envoking the Abrahamic God in its identity as a nation, and its government attempting to justify their actions in the name of such a God, yet turn around and gravely mistreat the immigrants on their doorstep, and antagonize their own allies, is a betrayal of its identity.
The film warns: America has broken Zeus’ Law.
Steve Donner shared some interesting thoughts in his reading of the film:
20. The point: Nothing is sacred in war, and we have lost all respect for basic decency and hospitality. We’re all the violators; we are all the suitors, we are all the cyclops. Consequently, all the towers and temples burn (“the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead”). It’s Odysseus’ guilt about his foreign wars manifesting again and he’s spent years avoiding the truth.
21. That’s why he’s unconsciously avoided home for twenty years: he simply cannot face what he has become, nor does he wish to show his shame to his wife and son.
I’m looking forward to seeing the movie again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, what did you think of The Odyssey? And if you read or listened to something interesting or provocative about the film, please share links!
Tags: Christopher Nolan · movies · The Odyssey
When progressive political commentator Keith Edwards recently turned the New York City Pride March into a two-hour livestream of queer joy, he put a name on what he was doing. The GLAAD-backed broadcast was built, in part, for people watching alone in states where Pride can feel dangerous. “One of the most radical things you can do in a moment of extreme fear and a moment of authoritarianism,” he told The Advocate, “is to experience joy and happiness.”
Weeks earlier, RuPaul had posted that the only response to fascism was to party and dance, and was sharply criticized for it. Two moments, weeks apart, but the same uneasy question beneath both of them: Is joy resistance? Or is it what we call avoidance when we want avoidance to sound principled?
In a country where LGBTQ+ people are watching their rights stripped away in statehouses, drag performers turned into political targets and trans people used as campaign-season fuel, “go dance” can sound almost heartless. But queer people have had this argument before.
In a 2013 Washington Blade essay about coming out during the AIDS crisis, Dave Purdy remembered older gay men telling him it was wrong for his generation to dance, party or enjoy themselves while their gay brothers were sick and dying. He and his friends rejected that view. For them, the dance floor was not an affront. It was survival, self-love and something close to church.
During the AIDS crisis, gay nightclubs were not merely places to escape. They were informal mutual-aid networks, grief rooms and information exchanges. They were places where bodies marked by fear could breathe, move, touch and feel alive again. When the state was slow to act, conservative preachers’ sermons were cruel and much of the country looked away, these spaces helped people endure.
I know because, in the early 1990s, I ran one of those clubs on Long Island.
The club was loud, crowded and alive in the way only a queer room can be when the world outside has made everyone inside feel disposable. People arrived carrying the private weight of family rejection, HIV panic, religious shame, police harassment and the everyday terror of being seen too clearly in the wrong place.
Then the bass would start. The lights would move. Someone would laugh loudly near the bar. A drag queen would cut through the room like a flare. For a few hours, fear did not vanish. It changed shape. It became bearable.
To outsiders, nightlife often looks like escape. Sometimes it is. There are worse things than needing to escape a world trying to crush you. But queer clubs were never only about forgetting. They were places where people remembered each other: who was sick, who had disappeared, who had a new doctor, who was pretending to be fine.
I saw that attention at work every night. Power did not only sit in the office or behind the bar. It lived in the queens who could read a face from across the room, the regulars who noticed an absence and the staff who could feel the room change before anyone else did. That was vigilance. Not paranoia. Not panic. A communal intelligence.
That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.
The dance floor was not where the crisis disappeared. It was where the living found one another inside it. That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.
Bars hosted fundraisers. Drag performers passed hats. DJs, bartenders, door people, lovers, ex-lovers, activists and friends formed networks that were not always formal but were often lifesaving. In Orlando, the Parliament House Motor Inn, a gay resort and nightclub, became a common site for AIDS fundraisers in the 1980s and 1990s. This detail matters because it collapses the false divide between pleasure and care. A place outsiders might dismiss as decadent was also where money was raised, grief was gathered and a frightened community turned nightlife into a lifeline. Chosen family was not a slogan. It was logistics.
Research has linked synchronized movement with social bonding and increased pain thresholds, while studies of dance and movement therapy have found benefits for depression, anxiety and interpersonal functioning. What outsiders now call resilience was, for us, simply the nightly practice of keeping one another going.
That is why the word “joy” can be misleading if we make it too soft. Joy in queer nightlife was and is sweaty, sexual, improvised, defiant, sometimes reckless, sometimes holy. It did not erase grief. It gave grief somewhere to go.
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None of this means dancing is enough. A party will not stop authoritarianism. A drag show will not repeal anti-LGBTQ legislation. A nightclub cannot replace courts, organizing, voting, or protest. Joy without vigilance can become anesthesia. Joy without community can become branding. Joy without politics can become escape for those privileged enough to leave others behind.
But the answer is not to dismiss joy. It is to understand what kind of joy has power — a lesson America needs now.
The country is confronting a crisis. We are politically exhausted, increasingly isolated, distrustful of institutions and surrounded by reasons to be afraid. More people are discovering that they can follow every headline, understand every threat and still have nowhere to put the fear.
Queer nightlife offered one answer, imperfect but profound: Put the fear in a room. Let it breathe alongside other people’s fear. Let the body remember that it is more than a battleground.
The joy created in queer nightlife was collective. It required a room. It required witnesses. It required people watching the door, watching each other and noticing when the mood shifted before trouble arrived. Pleasure and protection had to coexist.
That was the real survival infrastructure; not joy by itself, but joy attached to community and vigilance.
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To survive a hostile world, people need pleasure and community, yes — but they also need history. They need to know what they are up against and what others survived before them. They need to care for each other while they watch the door. They need to build systems that do not depend on the benevolence of institutions that may never come.
The pushback against “party and dance” landed because it sounded like the whole plan. It cannot be the whole plan. But it can be part of one.
We did not dance through the AIDS crisis because things were fine. We danced because everything was not fine, because the body needed proof it still belonged to the living. We danced because grief without community becomes isolation, and isolation is where despair does its best work.
Dancing didn’t solve the crisis, but it helped us survive long enough to keep fighting.
This is not nostalgia. It is instruction.
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From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution, a five-part series premiering on PBS in October. “Ponder this: All the incredible diversity of animal life on Earth sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other.”
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