texas medicine 11.5%, railroad gin holding steady at 40%, bootleg whiskey 0.5%, champagne 25%, wine 23%

Reread JF Powers’s brilliant short story “Death of a Favorite” (as one does) and chanced on this edifying reminiscence johnrosengren.net/powers/

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I had to do some deep file diving, but after all these years, I finally found the video! Thanks to @William95274068 for sparking this search. This video is a true treasure, with Lou talking about breaking the all time stolen bases record just a few days before this interview. I hope you all enjoy it. Lou was such a kind and personable man, and this video shows it. #STLCards

'Rational Subtitles' is optimistic 💙 Read a little bit abt 'cognitive empathy' & think may play a role in how some lt fans don't get the stories framework Admire the expressive (& hilarious) mind, but to me, Bob Dylan work is not ever surface level That's the whole point! ⚡️

Been saying this for years. It’s a SUPPORTERS section. Good on @Cardinals.

John Prine and Bob Weir would meet up for one weekend a year in Nashville and do 3 days of songwriting over breakfast. To just randomly have stumbled upon that…

90 years old @25JulianJavier celebrating the @Cardinals Fans all the way from hometown of San Francisco Dominican Republic

great insights (as usual) from @_Ben_Clemens

NEW: The NYT sent an email to freelancers today forbidding contributors from submitting "any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced" by generative AI. The "reminder" follows a string of AI incidents at the paper: futurism.com/artificial-inte…

BREAKING: Alligator Alcatraz to close in June, according to sources who spoke to @cbsmiami My story below cbsnews.com/miami/news/flori…

This reader comment on a NY Times column where Ross Douthat ponders that maybe God is speaking to us through A.I. is an absolute fastball on the corner with movement, and deserves a column. "Lightening was once mysterious too; mystery did not make Zeus correct" is perfect.

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario. a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose. the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant. he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests. Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead. Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on. Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for. then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company." GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing. then he splits the users by income. Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%. 18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time. so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for. it isn't recommending the best option for you. it's reading the room. and the room is paying. read this: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08525

What a beautiful fucking movie these brothers made. 💯 the pride of Collinsville, Illinois. (Move over, ⁦Michael Stipe⁩!) stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-t…

Kash Patel’s colleagues are alarmed by what they describe as erratic behavior and excessive drinking—conduct that could cost him his job, Sarah Fitzpatrick reports. She spoke with more than two dozen people with knowledge of his conduct, some of whom described it as a national-security vulnerability. theatln.tc/2T74xHfh

“Well, the guy’s a criminal. I don’t know anything that’s named after a criminal. There’s no Lucky Luciano Bridge or Jeffrey Epstein Highway. It’s insane.” Talked to the man suing over the Donald Trump International Airport rebrand: miaminewtimes.com/news/pilot…

Have @MLB batters always yelled “FUCK!” really loud when they pop out foul to an infielder?

Oof, Scott. Just…oof.

This 'Don't Start Me Talkin' performance - the idea of this Bob Dylan character free to play whatever he feels like playing :) Think back then ppl only saw once on broadcast tv? So grateful to live in a time get to watch & admire now ... on demand! 😎❤️

From All-Star to Archaeology. Former Astros and Phillies closer Brad Lidge is now an archaeologist researching the Etruscan civilization. This was not on my 2026 bingo card, but it's cool as hell. penn.museum/blog/major-leagu…

“…the day Scotty Forester swung open the door of the family car,
climbed up, put one hand on the wheel and, then…found and released  the brake….” —Suzanne Cleary (do I detect a whiff of David Clewell herein?) poets.org/poem/mercury