Seth Godin on not wasting time with the wrong priorities.

If you’re feeling creative, do the errands tomorrow.

If you’re fit and healthy, take a day to go surfing.

When inspiration strikes, write it down.

The calendar belongs to everyone else. Their schedule isn’t your schedule unless it helps you get where you’re going.

Will Leitch would like to turn back the clock on sports and politics.

I, for one, cannot wait to root hard for the USMNT tomorrow night, when they host Mexico in Cincinnati: Beating our rivals in World Cup qualifiers in Ohio is a U.S. Soccer tradition I’m ready to return to. But can the country get behind this team the way it did back in 2014? Can the country, collectively, get behind anything anymore? I don’t know. I hope so. Because it sure would be nice to be able to scream “America, fuck yeah!” again, surrounded by patriots, hipster or otherwise.

I don’t think the toothpaste can go back into the tube. I hope I’m wrong.

This headline by John DeVore is troubling, a little shocking, and sadly all too true. I have only seen the odd clips of this trial, but from what little I’ve seen it looks like the judge is biased, but ultimately it won’t matter what the jury decides.

It doesn’t matter if Rittenhouse is acquitted. I don’t think he should be but I’m not part of the jury. It’s not my say. If he is acquitted, however, it will send a message to right-wing extremists that shooting protestors is possible, just not the ones waving blue Trump flags, or the ones trying to kick down the doors of the U.S. Capitol. But it’s open season on the woke, otherwise.

It also doesn’t matter what the verdict is because this dumb kid’s life is ruined. He’s going to be used as a political prop by conservative white men drunk on hate for years. He may get to go TV! Make some money. He’ll be called a hero, and then, one day, he’ll be forgotten by the powerful and he’ll be left alone with his conscience. I hope the dead haunt him.

Not soon enough.

The killer medium is email. The killer service is the newsletter. Why? Because you have control. Dave Pell should know… he’s the Managing Editor of the Internet.

Thanks in part to humanity’s success against the scourge of spam, the inbox is one of the few places where you actually have control over an information feed. If you want a newsletter, subscribe. If you don’t want a newsletter, unsubscribe. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get to decide what’s more likely to appear in your email stream. The Russians are not setting up a disinformation campaign in your inbox. It is your inbox and your own private antisocial network. You are the algorithm. This is the core reason why the noisier the rest of the internet gets, the more popular the quiet, humble newsletter becomes. And it’s why, during the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, the presidential election, the Big Lie, and the insurrection, when we were being pulverized by an unprecedented onslaught of information, newsletters felt like a welcome respite from the noise and were suddenly the biggest new (but far from the newest) thing in media.

Yup.

Nicholas Bate on turning up.

Turn up at the page rain or shine, good mood or bad mood, inspired or not.

Much writing is the mechanics of fingers on keyboard and pencil jottings in a notebook.

And habit makes that easier.

I really need to get into a better writing habit.

I’m not up on the current events of professional wrestling. I used to be. I used to know it all inside and out. The shoots. The bookers. The legends. The up and comers. Now, I’m out. Been out for a while.

And then my friend points me to this post about a wrestler I’ve never heard of before. A wrestler who has lived a life, man. A wrestler who came from nothing and had just a little bit above nothing for most of his career. A wrestler who needed a couple of breaks, just to pay his mortgage.

And like Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in. Eddie Kingston has a story. I’m glad he told it. You should read it.

Drew Magary on the tired act of Aaron Rodgers:

If you still wanna call Aaron Rodgers the greatest quarterback of all time, whether it’s because of his incomparable style of play or because you just don’t wanna say it’s Tom Brady like everyone else would, go right ahead. I’ve idolized terrible men in sports, and I’d be fine with the character clause for the Baseball Hall of Fame crumpled into a ball and then smacked 475 feet into a flowing river. But SOME measure of public accountability would be nice here. I’d like the man booed.

I honestly don’t care. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not have a favorite NFL team or player.

I wish he was vaccinated, and I hope he doesn’t get seriously ill and die, but if at least if it keeps him from making stupid State Farm commercials I’d be happy.

I’d say pretty stupid.

I mean, it’s a science-fictional idea that may or may not happen in my lifetime. In the short term, it’s just a shiny object that Zuck wants to use to fool people into thinking his company is not a terrible one on practically every level.

Matt Birchler thinks otherwise:

I don’t think a world where we spend all of our time in a digital world is good, nor do I think Facebook (damnit, Meta) is the best company to sheppard this concept forward, but I do think that we’re further down this road than many people think we are.

We aren’t. All the things he talks about AR, smart watches, etc. are still firmly in the real world. Wake me up when we have Ready Player One-style worlds.

Zed Snyder, writing for Smile Politely, has a nice write-up for Dan Wild’s new collection.

Stories For Imaginary Friends guides you into the dark, but it also brings you out the other side realizing that you didn’t just read a collection of stories. You’re asked—quite literally begged—not to give up on yourself, or on the things in your life that maybe you stopped working on because it was too hard to see any light.

Dan is a treasure and I’m pleased I can call him my friend. His stories are incredible. You should buy the book.

Tim Curry explains why Halloween is great in “The Halloween Song” from the 1986 film adaptation of The Worst Witch.

This is always the best thing about Halloween.

A ton of reporters contributed to this Washington Post feature today about how the insurrection of January 6 played out. It starts off with these damning first five paragraphs.

Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol. The pro-Trump rioters toppled security barricades. They bludgeoned police. They scaled granite walls. And then they smashed windows and doors to breach the hallowed building that has stood for more than two centuries as the seat of American democracy.

The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack. Even as the violence at the Capitol intensified, even after Vice President Mike Pence, his family and hundreds of Congress members and their staffers hid to protect themselves, even after the first two people died and scores of others were assaulted, Trump declined for more than three hours to tell the renegades rioting in his name to stand down and go home.

During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. Within the first hour, two rioters died as a result of cardiac events. Sixty-four minutes in, a rioter paraded a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol. Seventy-three minutes in, another police officer was sprayed in the face with chemicals. Seventy-eight minutes in, yet another police officer was assaulted with a flagpole. Eighty-three minutes in, rioters broke into and began looting the House speaker’s office. Ninety-three minutes in, another news photographer was surrounded, pushed down and robbed of a camera. Ninety-four minutes in, a rioter was shot and killed. One hundred two minutes in, rioters stormed the Senate chamber, stealing papers and posing for photographs around the dais. One hundred sixteen minutes in, a fourth police officer was crushed in a doorway and beaten with his own baton.

All in the first two hours.

Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.

The whole thing is harrowing to read.

So, I was today years old when I learned that the big international hit “Beggin’” by Måneskin is actually a cover of a Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons song of the same name.

I was surprised how close Damiano David’s voice is to Frankie Valli on the song.

Also, I Wanna Be Your Slave might have you questioning your sexuality.

This is only the beginning...

Thank you to those who have experienced @dunemovie so far, and those who are going in the days and weeks ahead. We're excited to continue the journey! pic.twitter.com/mZj68Hnm0A

— Legendary (@Legendary) October 26, 2021

I really didn’t think it wasn’t going to happen, but you never know.

Bernie Miklasz with the inside story.

I can’t say that Oliver Marmol was born to manage the Cardinals. But this is true: he was raised to manage the Cardinals. The inevitable became official on Tuesday morning, when chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and president of baseball operations John Mozeliak presided over a video news conference to introduce their choice as manager. As soon as the job became open I listed Marmol as the frontrunner, and this was his job all along. There was little if any suspense to the job search.

Marmol was raised as a Cardinal.

And now will lead the Cardinals.

Okay, young man. Let’s see what you got.