World Cup tourists fall in love with middle America — raving about Waffle House at 1 a.m., Buc-ee's gas stations, and strangers driving them to stadiums in the rain. Oxford Economics expects 1.24 million international visitors for the tournament, and their viral posts are showcasing a side of the country most foreign media never covers.

WE’RE GOING TO AN ELLA LANGLEY CONCERT ON THE 18TH AND WE’RE EVEN GOING TO MEET HER!!!!

🚨Nerd Alert 🚨 Especially for the LA Political Nerds. politicaldata.vote/ *Please use laptop/desktop, not optimized for phone This site takes LA County 2026 Primary Election Results, and the @Political_Data records of who voted... and breaks out analysis for EVERY election in LA (except judges) gives you the ability to: - Visualize precinct maps / winners in a district (and the LA portions of legislative/congressional seats) - Select sub-geographies (Mayor by council district, Senate by City, City council seat by neighborhood, etc) - See regression analysis of results by Age, Race, Party and ethnicity, showing correlations or lack thereof. - Take in the Ecological Inference analysis (viewer beware) which gives a statistical analysis of subgroup voting trends. Read the prompt before digging in, EI can seem strange! - Run correlations of candidates against each other - like you can see based on precinct-level data just how much was @nithyavraman tied to @TomSteyer or @kennethmejiaLA While there is a lot of stuff on LA Mayor, this has everything -so you could literally compare governor race to Glendale School board or Long Beach city council, or whatever. This is all experimental. Hope to build out to other counties as we can get access to the data. This was a lot of work... hope you enjoy!! Send feedback as I will continue to play around with this.

Did you know LA County is the largest county in the country? With 2,217,796 ballots cast, LA County's vote total exceeds the combined vote count of five of the nation's largest counties that have held primaries so far, which together cast 2,103,322 ballots.

A GUY AT GOOGLE DEEPMIND MADE AN ISOMETRIC PIXEL-ART MAP OF NEW YORK CITY AND PUT IT ON THE OPEN WEB FOR FREE it's called isometric.nyc you open the tab and the city is just sitting there in classic SimCity 2000 isometric pixel art. you scroll. and it keeps going. and going. i zoomed in on midtown and i could read the H&M signage in times square. in red. as actual pixel-art letters on the side of a building. i could see the crystalline spire of the Bank of America Tower poking out of a clump of skyscrapers. individual rooftop HVAC units. tiny green roof gardens. the little driveway loops in front of the hotels. he estimates the map needs roughly 40,000 tiles. nothing is a placeholder. the guy who made it is Andy Coenen, a senior staff engineer at Google DeepMind. he is not a pixel artist. by his own admission he is "a former electronic musician." what he actually did is kind of insane: > pulled NYC's geometry from the Google Maps 3D tiles API > fine-tuned an open-source image model (Qwen-Image-Edit) on ~40 hand-paired examples of "satellite tile → pixel art tile" > spun up 50 parallel instances on rented GPUs and generated tens of thousands of tiles in a few hours > the fine-tune cost him 12 bucks his own stated mission for the project, verbatim, is one sentence: "what's possible now that was impossible before?" apparently the answer is "one engineer can pixel-art most of a metropolis for the price of a sandwich." and the wildest part to me is he didn't sell it. no signup. no paywall. no NFT. you open the URL and the city is yours to wander. the post landed at 1,325 points on Hacker News and topped bestofshowhn's 2026 list. we live in a timeline where a senior engineer at one of the largest AI labs on earth spent his nights pixel-arting Manhattan for fun and then gave it away. the internet is healing.

Having spent time with Xavier Becerra on the campaign trail, I know he will stand strong against Donald Trump and look out for Californians across the state. Californians deserve a governor who will fight for our values and bring down costs, not bend the knee to MAGA extremism that will take our state backwards. I look forward to working with my fellow Democratic candidates to elect @XavierBecerra in November.

We found another surreal place on our way. I know some people will say I’m too positive about everything I see, but this place was crazy. They had a shooting range in the store.

With 8 minutes left in the game, the Spurs had a huge lead and a 99.5% chance of winning, according to ESPN analytics. The Knicks had just a 0.5% chance of winning -- before ultimately winning

Why a national popular vote would be impossible to administer

1 lead change

New - Florida Governor primary 🔴 Donalds 42% 🔴 Fishback 39% TPSI #C - LV - 6/9

Why is California so slow at counting votes? Here’s Sen. Padilla, the former CA Secretary of State: “For starters, you have to consider the volume. There's more registered voters in California than there are people in Florida. So even if it was just a 50% turnout, it's 11.5 million ballots, more combined than Iowa, Rhode Island, Connecticut.” “Second, it’s a huge amount of vote by mail, and so if you want safe, secure elections…you should run all the safeguards, including but not limited to signature verification, so all that takes a little bit of time, too.” “Third, California is one of the states that allows ballots to come in a couple days after the election. As long as it's postmarked on or before, it should count. It shouldn't be eliminated, because the postal service may be a little bit slow, especially for members serving overseas.”