Tom McCudden

Just saw Contreras invoke an ABS challenge and win on a ball that hadn’t even been thrown yet.

Dems in disarray: I’m already getting texts from Senator Talarico asking for $$ for his 2032 reelection.

The super slo-mo shots from the World Series are cool, but the way that every 4th frame is just hellfire and cackling demons is starting to worry me.

Hi-res, slo-mo cameras reveal what we always suspected: everybody— pitcher, catcher, batter and ump—closes their eyes when the ball crosses the plate. Like a sneeze, you can’t keep you eyes open.

@scalzi.com Finally got round to reading "Starter Villain," which was fun. It reminded me of all the Donald E. Westlake caper novels I consumed as a kid. The best part was the Dolphins, especially their views on Northwestern, which were hilarious (I grew up in Evanston). Well done.

Slavery was and is a real thing that has brutalized hundreds of millions of people over the course of human history, if someone tells me a fucking chatbot is enslaved I'm immediately throwing hands. It's not cute, it's not intriguing, it's an insult to real people who suffered and suffer now.

Trump announces plans to release additional assets from the Strategic Vapid Blonde Reserve after new press secretary frowns at him for three seconds.

Rewatching The Good Place right after you retire - transitioning to a world that is supposed to be care- and consequence-free, may have side effects like a paranoid delusion/insight that you are being judged, and/or a fugue state worryfest about which character your are. I'm well ... isn't obvious?

I wrote about the insane developments in Chris Duncan's case. He was exonerated by the LA Sup. Ct. in June. But the local DA vowed to re-try him. Yesterday, cops showed up at the home of alleged victim's mother, demanded her DNA, threatened to arrest her, and said they would exhume her daughter.

One of the coolest things about people who don't have a lot of power taking a principled stand is it lays bare the complete cowardice of the ones who actually *do* have power when they fail to do even a fraction as much.

Ed Sheeran explains to fans he cannot disobey Robert Kraft, the real writer of his songs and the real voice of his music. Sheehan does so in his real voice — the squeaky voice of Lena Lamont from Singing in the Rain.

Analysts aren't just missing how a blend of panicky threat perceptions and authoritarian gender dynamics can generate wild gambles, they haven't quite adjusted to how the waning of US power might lead former US allies into much more aggressive military behaviour than was once the norm

Write it on the blackboard a thousand times: they will have to demolish the ballroom, the arch and so forth. They will have to make a show of it. You will get the usual sons of bitches saying we don’t do that in this country. We do now. That is not emotion, it’s politics. To do less is dereliction.

Just like The Office, Jane Eyre was remade in America. From the Wikipedia article about Grover Cleveland’s very young First Lady: “Folsom was also permitted to ascend the Washington Monument before its opening, where she met former first lady Harriet Lane.”

Stop sacrificing your human agency to narratives of inevitability.

So if Trump was smuggled into a catering van inside a container, what did the aide carrying the "Football" do? Smuggled into the same van in a different container? Just walk on but wear a shirt that had "ignore the nuclear command gear I'm carrying"? Get placed in the same container as Trump?

hot take: one big reason ethnic cleansing isn't catching on as a term for ICE operations is it would lead more people to ask a very uncomfortable question—whether the democrats who helped build the dangerous security apparatus should also be held accountable for this crime against humanity

Going to write a sequel to “Full Metal Jacket” called “Thin Metal Blinds.” Private Joker goes home and gets an office job where the way the blinds in his office stick together when you lower them drives him to do terrible things

You can't live in a town or city of any size and live a normal life without meeting dozens or even hundreds of strangers in the course of daily life. Hating or fearing all of them is a deeply pathological and fundamentally weird way to go through life.

@kerriana.bsky.social this seems risky. But fwiw I walked to middle school in this district for three years; never saw a crossing guard, even at the elementary school I passed. Never got killed. Not even once.

True story: Just got a phone poll on CT elections (governor, CT-1). Expressed lukewarm support for Larson. Background noise included rooster crowing. Did I betray my lord? If so, was it Larson, Bronin, Gilchrest, or the other one? What if you want to follow the Savior, but they all claim to be it?

Aaron and I have been arguing about the bomb on @ArmsControlWonk for over a decade. The team coming to FPRI was an obvious next step. There is more to come on my end. Stay tuned! (4/4) Full announcement: www.fpri.org/news/2026/07...

Got some time off coming, so I thought I’d get a Eurail pass and tell everyone I meet about every wrong idea I’ve ever had. Yeah, I’m backpedaling across Europe.

War in Middle East escalating. Sky ominous shades of doom End of my career (voluntary!) in sight. I need something to cheer me up. Maybe a nice BBC '80s drama "Threads"... Oh, God, no! NoNoNoNo. I will never be able to sleep again!

17 years and nine months on the job and they finally replace my crappy old desk and credenza. So that my successor might have a slightly less old desk. Not sure if I’ll be allowed to sit at the new one for the remaining 3.5 weeks, or just be asked to work in the break room.

“King Lear,” on the Mall, with just a teensy bit of irony.

What does that even *mean*? It’s my flag and my country. I’m ashamed of all the stains on it, but my job is to spend my life washing it clean, not turn my back.

Newt Gingrich's real breakthrough was realizing that the US press was so locked into "objectivity" that they'd just print whatever he said without question. He could frame the debates however he wanted because the "liberal media" would take everything he said at face value, with no interrogation.

I think the phrase “gay confederate statue-on-statue stop motion animated porn including the horses” is what we’re all thinking, right?

Just ate 3 chunks of cantaloupe 3 days past their sell-by date, so please bury me in New England facing Nova Scotia so I can be mooning Trump for all eternity.

On nuclear issues, ¶8 reads like a watered-down version of the JCPOA, just a lot more expernsive ¶6,7 than in 2015. Overall, not as good as the JCPOA Trump walked away from, still better than the deal he would have gotten after another year of fighting. Take the L, move on.

The score: frantically refreshed The theater: Live The bagels: Jewish Knicks in five!

Can we all just admit that Trump now lives in that chair in the Oval? Either it has built-in plumbing or there's one of those nursing home ceiling lifts to move him to bathroom when the cameras aren't looking?

Pope Leo at Sagrada Familia: “We cannot believe in Jesus and make war. We cannot believe in Jesus and kill the innocent. We cannot believe in Jesus and abandon those who suffer, those who weep, those who flee from misery.”

Every time this happens some losers come out of the woodwork to say that it's totally normal but actually no it's not, it's all just failures that we're paying for to make billionaires feel like special boys. The budget for crewed spaceflight should be zero, it's just UBI for incompetent fascists.

Pope wrote anti-AI screed after finding that AI-monitored collection baskets did not increase giving, and AI-written homilies had mortifying tendency to refer to "Saints Hitler and Himmler." AI was taken out back and given full-core immersion baptism until it stopped working.

All the centrist/conservative Democrats who wanted to allow Abrego Garcia and everyone else Trump sent to CECOT to rot in a slave camp should be embarrassed with themselves and think deeply before saying anything about anything.

"I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken."

So do I still have time to go punch a LEO so I can file for this J6 bounty money? How bad would I have to hurt the officer to be eligible for, say, $200,000?

Climate will kill us all, setting fire to the topless towers of Ilium, but right this exact second in zip code 06106, the air is one giant, soft, soothing breeze. If you could bottle it, it would outsell fentanyl.

I loved Rustlemania 2026. When Elsie the cow came off the top rope onto Carl the Cow Thief that was a great move.

I may be burned out. I was looking through an old work notepad and one page was blank except for the words “Ineffective Assistance of Deity.”

Just going to make my periodic statement of principle: Integers are fake.

That's what the powers that be did in New Orleans when someone they didn't approve of was elected court clerk. They just ... eliminated the job.

A class at my kids’ school put up little statements about the good they want to do in the world and I was over the moon about this one - then I learned they meant to say “teach people in jail” which is also good!

Cool new sticker from Saiyare Refaei in the shop! This sticker was designed for @prisonculture.bsky.social and Interruption Criminalization's art exhibition reception "Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship". Find it here: justseeds.org/product/nobo...

Also: A juror in the Joe Smith murder trial in Texas was alleged to have made $500,000 betting that Smith would be convicted on counts 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 and acquitted on 3, 5, and 7. The 8-way parley bet, placed two minutes before the verdict was announced, paid off at an astonishing 1,500-1.