Short takes on topics delightful, powerful, destructive and dumb from posts that had been drafted but weren’t ready as stand-along pieces in prime time.
Opinions are just like noses. Everybody has them. Here are a few of mine.
GOOOOOOOOOOOAL
Let’s begin with something that’s right with the world.
Phil Hay—who hails from Scotland—had a wonderful piece in The Athletic late in June. It is seldom that I agree with every word someone writes, but Hay’s article I don’t speak Spanish, but Telemundo’s World Cup coverage is a rollercoaster is pitch perfect (pun intended).
I, too, have become a fan of Telemundo’s World Cup coverage without understanding a word the announcers are saying. Andrew, who speaks pretty fluent Spanish, had to admit that the announcers’ diction was flawless but they spoke so fast that he only picked up about half of what they were saying. And that’s Hay’s point when he cites “one of the best discoveries of my trip to the 2026 World Cup: Telemundo’s television match commentary.”
“I’ve been hooked on it ever since, flying blind without the faintest idea of what is going on in the commentary booth. I can’t recommend the mystery enough.
Conversely, in this scenario, not speaking Spanish is a bonus because it turns Telemundo into a theme-park ride where you’re in the dark and unable to see where the tracks are going next. The enthusiasm of the commentators is unrivalled and scary, bordering on cardiac arrest. I could take them to Peterhead versus Arbroath, north coast of Scotland, middle of December, midweek night with a crowd of 345, and they’d turn it into Lionel Messi’s finest hour. We’re about 40 matches into the World Cup, and I haven’t heard them phone it in once. Every day is a fresh start.“
Hay notes that they talk incessantly, and that’s great.
“Listening to it is like being at the lights with a Mustang next to you, revving its engine. Sometimes it’s roaring, sometimes it’s purring, but it’s always ticking over.”
FEED THE HUNGRY. CLOTHE THE POOR. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR. HOW VERY RADICAL.
I have become a big fan of Christopher Hale’s Substack Letters from Leo. As I wrote a few days ago, Hale is from my hometown, growing up in Murfreesboro’s St. Rose of Lima Catholic Parish with “the kind of Southern Catholic upbringing where you learn early that your faith puts you at odds with polite company.”
While there is zero chance I’ll be converting, I am enjoying watching and listening to this pope carry forward the work of his predecessor, Pope Francis. Leo is working from a conviction that it is important, as he said recently, to “resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person.”
Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor. Love your neighbor. How very radical.
In a recent post entitled “Communion Is Not Built by Clinging Rigidly” — Pope Leo XIV Defends Diversity at the Pallium Mass, Hale discussed the homily Leo preached before the conferral of pallium on the shoulders of new archbishops.
“[It] was, in its quiet way, beautiful. He turned to the keys of Peter, the symbol stamped on every image of the first pope, and refused the obvious reading of them.
‘A key does not break down doors,’ he said. ‘Rather, it opens and closes them by finding the proper levers within and guiding their movements, so that locks may release, bolts withdraw, and doors turn freely on their hinges, thereby joining rooms together and transforming many isolated spaces into one welcoming home.’”
Imagine leaders who listen, who work to build up rather than tear down.
LET’S TALK ABOUT AI
Some people—I am even close friends with a few—love AI and what it promises.
I learned from a recent piece by Eve Fairbanks in The Atlantic—The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI—that the sentence in the paragraph above is one that tutorials on how to strip the telltale signs of AI use from your writing would hate. Those tutorials tell you to “get rid of em dashes” and colons. I LOVE em dashes AND I’m pretty fond of colons as well, sometimes even in the same sentence. I’ve been using them for years. But I suspect that no one believes I use AI to write these posts.
Leonard Pitts, Jr.—who I have long admired as a deep thinker and terrific writer—also has a piece I commend to you entitled This Was Written by a Human Being. I would love it for this sentence alone:
“I am a worshiper at the First Church of the Written Word, a lover of language, a student of its rhythm, its music, its violence and its power.”
There are all sorts of reasons to be very wary about AI. Let’s begin with the folks who are behind it and what they are doing to build artificial intelligence. Actually, I’ll just let Naomi Klein say it for me.
Naomi Klein writes a great deal about the dangers of AI. If you want to go deeper, watch the video where she is joined by tech analyst, journalist, and author Paris Marx to break down the dangers behind Silicon Valley’s push for an AI-centered world, including for the environment, education, and democracy.
Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information adds another piece to this puzzle in How data centers are blowing a hole in state budgets.
Finally, Pope Leo also weighed in on AI with his Magnifica Humanitas encyclical (read it here). As John Sarvay writes:
What Pope Leo did with Magnifica Humanitas is reclaim something the tech industry has quietly seized: the moral authority to decide what these tools are for, who they serve, and what we owe each other in their wake. And beneath that political claim, a deeper one: that while AI models “may imitate language, behavior… or even simulate empathy,” they are fundamentally empty of what makes us human.”
Christopher Hale has, as you would expect, written thoughtfully and extensively about Magnifica Humanitas. Here are four essays that you may find of interest.
- “Disarm AI” — Pope Leo XIV Drops His First Encyclical on Slavery, Algorithms, and War
- ‘The Grand Humbling’ — Silicon Valley Responds to Pope Leo XIV
- Pope Leo XIV Just Quoted The Lord of the Rings Against Peter Thiel’s Empire — and Thiel Is Now Fleeing America
- Pope Leo XIV’s New AI Encyclical Is Already Making a Dent in Trump’s Washington
As Pitts says, stories are how we explain ourselves to ourselves. That requires us to think. If we turn everything over to AI we stop thinking.
CARS AND TRUCKS ARE TOO D**N BIG
I hate large SUVs. They take up way more space on the road than they need to. The drivers can’t see pedestrians (so pedestrian and cyclist deaths are up). And for me, their lights shine right in my eyes, blinding me as I drive.
There is a great graphic story on large SUVs in the New York Times entitled The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s
“For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75 percent.
The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story . . . the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.
After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and S.U.V.s is an important factor.”
“IT IS THE JUDICIARY’S DUTY TO CHECK LAWLESSNESS, NOT EXPEDITE IT”*
I’ve written so much about the judicial wing of the Republican Party (AKA the Supreme Court), that I don’t want to beat this dead horse. We knew that the Extreme Court’s final week would bring a rash of bad decisions, and we were right.
The fact that the birthright decision was not a 9-0 vote based on the very clear text of the 14th Amendment shows how corrupt this bunch is. As one commentator noted, “Sam, Clarence and Neil voted against the original text of the 14th amendment because, well, you need to pretext the original text to understand how they really feel about it, see?”
This cartoon from the decision to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2023 still stands.
There are too many decisions where the court has decided that it knows better than the founders, the Constitution, and 250 years of political practice to list them all, but the Slaughter decision this week—allowing the President the power to fire the members of independent regulatory agencies, thus granting the office even more power—is worth noting. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing:
“Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong…. [T]he Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”
Justice Elena Kagan succinctly spelled out so many of the problems with this current court in her 2023 dissent to Biden v. Nebraska:
“…the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”
John Roberts is the worst Chief Justice since Roger Taney, and all six of the conservative justices lied about their respect for precedent at their confirmation hearings to gain a seat on the high court. What’s 90 years of precedent, as in the Slaughter case, when you have an ideology to impose on the nation?
Jeez. These guys can’t be removed fast enough.
GREENWATERGATE
Now, this is just stupid.
Justin Briley writing in Liberal Currents, considers why Greenwatergate has stuck when so many other incidents have not in a post entitled Let Us Reflect.
“Call it Greenwatergate. In the ruined ripples of the Reflecting Pool, between the lines of his panicked attempts to backfill excuses and deflect blame, in the swirling foam of hydrogen peroxide and algal blooms, perhaps here, through the fog of whatever ails him, he begins too late to confront the true and complete shape of the man in the mirror.”
Have a wonderful day.
More to come . . .
DJB
*A quote from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in last year’s case permitting the dismantling of the Department of Education.
Photo from 2026 World Cup by Omar David Sandoval Sida via Wikimedia Commons
MORE TO COME... 