“I am an American, Chicago born,” begins Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; somethings an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Though he was born in Montreal, it was “that somber city” on Lake Michigan where Bellow acquired his American voice, in ample evidence through the propulsive swagger of his most celebrated novel’s first sentence.

Bellow has long had a reputation for being conservative, stodgy, and tweedy, which is not undeserved. But in The Adventures of Augie March (long appreciated more in Europe than the country where it was written) there is a distinctive style of voice simultaneously tough and tender, a focalized first person narration that, with its combination of Biblical parallelism and wryness, is distinctly of the United States’ eternal second city.

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Every American writer, if that adjective is to mean anything, must in their prose or poetry pen their own Declaration of Independence, almost as if it’s something in the collective unconscious, some seething and hidden mind that animates the national genius. As brilliant as The Adventures of Augie March, a picaresque novel about its titular protagonist as he perambulates through the Chicago of the Great Depression, its voice is not sui generis. Instead, its genesis comes from “Song of Myself,” where the poet provides self-encomium to “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” That was the Big Bang in poetry for American first-person narration, and the influence of Whitman on Bellow is obvious. It’s a declaration not just of independence, but of existence.

Every American writer, if that adjective is to mean anything, must in their prose or poetry pen their own Declaration of Independence, almost as if it’s something in the collective unconscious.

It is telling that Whitman begins with a statement of identity, then moves into the national allegiance (defined through his roughness), which is then conflated with the universe. At its worst, American individualism (with its myths of boot-strapping and entrepreneurial can-do) is just the propaganda of commercialism, a supply-side fable. Whitman, however, moves the locus of that individualism from the merely economic, or even the political, into something metaphysical. This is the disembodied consciousness gaining sentience, willing its own life into being, and realizing that nothing is actually disembodied, thus learning to lean and loaf and invite the soul. A reviewer at the London-based From the Critic mocked Whitman as an “amiable savage,” likening him to Caliban and describing Leaves of Grass as being written by someone who “relies on his own rugged nature; and trust to his own rugged language,” an element which “carries in its bosom the seeds of decay.” The reviewer was an idiot, of course, as the great, gray poet introduced the very opposite.

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It only took a few decades for Whitman’s American first-person narration to be translated into prose, and in that manifestation it’s just as simultaneously declaratory and languid, self-assured and natural: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sayer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Here was a novel, finally, that was unequivocally American. Not Puritan-haunted like the great writers of New England, or even the cosmopolitan eccentricities of a Melville, but fully and totally spoken in a new voice that was of the broad, mid-section of the continent.

Twain’s 1885 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which Bellow so shamelessly and gloriously cribbed his title from) wasn’t the first great American novel, but it was the first great novel that was so unabashedly American. The voice of Huck Finn, that wayward orphan of the Mississippi, is drawn from the syntax and diction of the poor and the enslaved; it sprouts from the fertile earth of Twain’s own Missouri. Imagine how Twain, that self-invented riverboat sailor, former Confederate soldier turned advocate for racial reconciliation, must have sounded to readers familiar with the dark, drawing-room prose of a Henry James, that stuffed New York Englishman? What Whitman did with poetry, Twain did with prose. The voice of Huck Finn echoes through subsequent American novels; it’s the language of that vibrant first-person narration. (There is a reason why Hemingway said that every American novelist writes in the shadow of Twain.)

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“She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise,” writes Philip Roth in the opening sentence of 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Often categorized along with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as exponents of a particularly Jewish-American sensibility, all three were additionally masters of the American voice. In Roth’s example, we see the obvious differences from a Twain or a Whitman, the evocation of a shtetl humor, the (to be revealed) psychoanalytic themes. But that Alex Portnoy, for all his differences, is a child of Huck Finn, shouldn’t be doubted. It’s the same self-affirmation, the same self-consciousness, whether from the Scots-Irish Twain or the Jewish Roth.

Post-war American literature is often identified as a time of “identity writing,” when ethnic minorities gave expression to their own stories that were too often occluded in the national imagination. This is accurate, but incomplete, for it also involved the full assimilation of that American first-person narration as well, as evidenced by that son of Twain named Roth. Because the first sentence of a novel is so crucial (the most important sentence in fact), it’s where the full effect of this voice is most apparent.

“If you really want to hear about it,” begins Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s 1951 classic of teen angst, The Catcher in the Rye, “the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Caulfield has the same rambling syntax (which despite its baroqueness is also understated), the same humor and profanity, the same dismissal of “literature” and his antecedents, as Huck Finn. Stick that red cap on the latter, put him in the mid-century Upper West Side rather than Antebellum Missouri, infuse him with some spending money, and they’re practically the same person.

You hear the same voice in Jewish-American Michael Chabon’s 1988 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (“At the beginning of summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business”); Greek-American Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 Middlesex (“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974”); the Native American Sherman Alexie’s 2007 Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (“I was born with water on the brain”); and Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (“This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom”).

All of these novels are launched by the unabashed declarative of the eternal “I,” of the first person’s power to remake the world anew. Even when that voice is uttered by the unseen narrator, it serves to make a declaration of identity. “I am an invisible man,” says the anonymous narrator in the Black novelist Ralph Ellison’s 1953 Invisible Man, “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind.” The same rhythm and syntactical prosody, the same humor and understatement, the same freeing dismissal of that which has come before.

What all of these authors share, from Twain to Plath, Bellow to Morrison, whether they speak ironically or angrily, hopefully or assertively, is that sense of cool which is so inexplicably American.

For sure, there is something about this swagger that’s coded as masculine, but that doesn’t mean that it must be written by a male novelist (quite the opposite), for among the most arresting voices in American first-person narration, and ones that often wryly subvert, were penned by women. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” says Esther Greenwood, the main character in poet Sylvia Plath’s 1963 classic about mental deterioration, The Bell Jar. A sentence equal parts jaded and menacing, evoking that steaming metropolis of open fire hydrants and jangling box fans in the most torrid months, all overlaid with the specter of treason and capital punishment, focalized through a young woman about to be institutionalized.

“Don’t be afraid,” says the young enslaved woman Florens in Toni Morrison’s 2008 A Mercy, “My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark, weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more, but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare my teeth.” A better explicator of the nineteenth-century’s structures of feeling than anyone who actually lived in the nineteenth-century, Morrison appropriates those old forms from the gothic to the epistolary (both in the case of A Mercy), crafting a voice that is unmistakably of the American variety. As with Plath’s, there is the same self-affirmation, the same occlusions and subversions and wordplay.

What all of these authors share, from Twain to Plath, Bellow to Morrison, whether they speak ironically or angrily, hopefully or assertively, is that sense of cool which is so inexplicably American. A diction from the shadows, a syntax best spoken in the in-between places. What the French so helpfully called noir. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills,” says the hard-boiled PI in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 The Big Sleep. “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” America always toggles between those extremes, sometimes shaved and sober, sometimes disheveled and drunk, with the voice always capable of encompassing both extremes. A grammar for those laying in the gutter but capable of seeing the whole goddamn kosmos.

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From American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America by Ed Simon. Copyright © 2026. Available from IG Publishing.

Toni Morrison didn’t want a monument or statue erected in her honor; she wanted a dedicated reading room in her hometown public library, a space that could allow for change and continuous engagement with her work. In this episode, Namwali Serpell visits the Toni Morrison Reading Room in the Lorain Public Library, before heading to a tour event at the CityClub Cleveland to open up a passage from Morrison’s novel Paradise alongside poet and writer Kortney Morrow.

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From the podcast:

Kortney Morrow: When I read the opening sentences from Paradise, “None of it was as good as what they learned at home sitting on the floor in a firelit room listening to war stories, to stories of great migrations,”, I really thought that these were stories of their own ancestors because this novel really does span the course of Black history in the United States, and also a little Native American history, and I almost felt silly when the line after says, “all there in the one book they owned then,” because what I read was so much more expansive than a book.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I think there’s this sense that they are telling their own war stories, but they’re finding a kind of resonance or echo in the Bible, which I think is also what we’re supposed to do when we read Morrison, right? We find resonance with the stories that she tells. But I think you’re right that the expansion or the sense of range in these stories, “war stories, stories of great migrations, failures and triumphs, fear, bravery, confusion, all there in the one book they owned.” It’s like all this has just gotten contained into this one box, right? And in a similar way, Deke and his brother have a desire to contain all of Black history in these towns, which are just as rigid and orderly, right? The streets, the houses, as the pages of a book itself.

KM: That’s fascinating. Yeah, this line, “The side streets seemed to him as satisfactory as ever.” I kept thinking, you have to be a particular type of person to find side streets satisfactory. But also, I know that person. I know about five of them.

NS: And those streets are named after the disciples and apostles. And so the streets also are the Bible. Right? It’s like this, the grid of the city and the grid of that book are the map of Deacon’s life.

KM: I think a lot about this last line, idleness, and just the main tension in the novel. And to me, this question of how to build towards freedom, it’s a question we’re still asking right now. And I thought about, a line I recently read in MLK’s Stride Toward Freedom, which was an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner, where he writes something like, “The person who believes that the path to racial justice is a one-lane road is the first to cause the traffic jam.”

NS: Wow, that is perfect. That is a perfect line for this, yeah.

KM: It also conjured up something for me, Etheridge Knight, the poet, who has a poem called “A Fable”, and there are 7 prisoners, all African American prisoners, who are stuck in a prison, and each believe they know the way out, and they are adamant that this is the only way, and they spend all their time debating which is the way out that they remain stuck. And wow, those things were on my mind as I was wrestling with this book, and I think this passage kind of pulled that out of me.

NS: Yeah, I think that’s a perfect kind of metaphor for the question of containment, which Morrison was really interested in. I think her first children’s book that she co-wrote with her son was called The Big Box, and it’s essentially a story about incarceration. It’s about children who get locked in this big box, and they’re asking about their own freedom. They’re asking, “How do you know what my freedom is?” So this tension between the younger generation seeking freedom and the older generation seeking freedom is something she’s always been interested in. And I think it manifests in this novel, interestingly, both as a conflict between this very orderly vision of a paradise, an all-Black utopia in Ruby, versus the convent, which is this unruly, female space. And we know it’s not racially pure because as Morrison begins this novel, she says, “They shoot the white girl first.” So we know there’s at least one white girl, right? So there’s a kind of war between these two versions of paradise that’s very much being set up here. But I think what’s interesting is within the paradise that is Ruby, there is also this conflict between the older generation and the younger generation.

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You can purchase On Morrison here and anywhere books are sold.

Cover art includes “Toni Morrison as Song of Solomon” by John Sokol (1981). “PASSAGES: On Morrison” is a production of the Random House Publishing Group.

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough.

I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons, its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way. I also wanted to talk to Ryan because buried somewhere inside SpaceX is X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022. That’s what Ryan cowrote that book about.

I was very confident that Musk would come to regret buying Twitter back then. I wrote a piece called “Welcome To hell, Elon,” which is probably the single most-read thing I’ve ever written. My thesis was that there would be no way to grow Twitter users and revenue without moderating the platform well and, ultimately, that Elon buying Twitter would destroy his reputation and cause damage to his other companies.

Now, we have the numbers from the SpaceX IPO filing to see how right my prediction was. X is shrinking by every major metric, but it may not matter, as Ryan points out. Take a listen, and let me know what you think.

Ryan and I also got into all those rules being broken to land the SpaceX IPO, rules about shareholder control, inclusion in the major index funds, and all the other levers of market accountability that usually serve to keep companies in check. You’re going to hear us say “corporate governance” a lot in this episode, and while it may sound boring, it won’t be if you take a shot every time it comes up.

Okay, don’t do that. But do consider what it means that Elon has become so rich, so powerful, and so detached from the levers of accountability that he can apparently get away with anything. That’s all without any of the major fund managers or investors calling foul because they don’t want to miss out on what could be the biggest financial windfall in recent memory. There’s a lot to think about in this episode.

Okay: New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac, on Elon Musk, X, and the SpaceX IPO. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ryan Mac, you’re a technology reporter at the New York Times. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I am really excited to talk to you. I can’t believe you’ve never been on the show before. I feel like we’ve done a lot of reporting in and around each other. I’m a big fan. Thanks so much for being on.

I know. What the hell, man? You just have avoided me this whole time. But no, I’m kidding. It’s good to be here. I’ve listened to many episodes, so great to be a part of it.

Well, now we’re going to ask you to answer for your crimes, which is what the Decoder audience really wants me to do, I guess.

Speaking of crimes, we’re going to talk about the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk has obviously filed to take SpaceX public. There’s a lot in that IPO, including the idea that there’s a $28 trillion addressable market for SpaceX services, which is more than the world. Just a lot in there.

You’ve reported on a lot of it. So I do want to dive into it, but I actually want to start with X, the everything app, the app formerly known as Twitter. Because the SpaceX S-1 really gives us our first look into what that business is, what it has become, where it’s growing.

In 2022, I wrote an article, maybe the most viral article I’ve ever written, it was called “Welcome to hell, Elon,” in which I very confidently predicted that buying Twitter would be a disaster for Elon Musk. I’m just going to read you my thesis. It was the first sentence of the piece. And then I want to try to back into what we know about X. I’m very curious if you think this has come true or not.

So my thesis was: “Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy Elon Musk’s reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to his other companies.”

There’s one view to say, “Yep, that totally came true.” There’s another view to say that actually Elon is more powerful than ever and on the cusp of an IPO that’s going to make him a trillionaire. So tell me about X. What do we know about X, the company in the years since Elon has bought it and what do we know about its financials as reported in this S-1?

Sure. I think you mentioned the word “growing” in all that and I think the place to start is the fact that X is simply not growing. It’s stagnated in terms of revenue, stagnated in terms of user growth. It’s been buried twice within Elon’s companies, first into xAI and now into SpaceX. So it’s become, in some ways, an afterthought in the Musk empire, despite it still being arguably Musk’s favorite thing. He spends countless hours a day on that thing, like many of us used to, and many of us still do.

But in terms of a business proposition, it’s a non-factor if you compare it to some of the other aspects of this business, something like Starlink, for example. If you look back at 2022, it’s just bizarre. He bought this company on a whim. He pitched this idea to investors that he would have one billion users. He would have integrated payments. It would be somewhere you could potentially book a taxi. He pitched this idea of it being WeChat. You mentioned the everything app. And it’s certainly not the everything app. At one point he was like, “You could watch TV on it.”

None of that has come to fruition. Yet I look at what’s happened in the last four to five years since then, and he’s gotten more powerful than ever. His net worth has increased. I think around the time he bought the company he was around $300 billion. His net worth now fluctuates anywhere from $600 to $800 billion these days. And a SpaceX IPO will take him potentially beyond the trillion dollar mark for the first time ever in human history. So it’s bizarre in that there are a lot of contradictory things about it, but at the end of the day, I’d argue he still comes out on top.

Is it just as simple as he bought a distribution platform for his own tweets and he controlled it and he fixed the algorithm to favor himself and that worked? And it doesn’t matter that revenue is down $100 million year over year and not even quite 40 percent of Twitter’s pre-acquisition revenue?

He’s destroyed the business by every metric we can see in the S-1. Every number is down. And only the revenue from data licensing to AI companies is up.

His own AI company too. Yes, if you singularly look at X as a business, it’s clearly a failure from the time he took over the company to Fidelity marking the valuation of the company down to $10 billion before he merged it with xAI. But also you have to look at it in the whole landscape of Musk Inc. Since he bought the company, he spun up xAI, raised billions of dollars for that company. He then merged it into xAI, burying it, and then he merged it again with xAI into SpaceX.

I guess he’s up, if you’re doing a plus-minus analysis of valuations of these companies. Again, these are valuations that seemingly have no basis in business fundamentals. We’re playing with Musk math here. He has this whole cadre of investors and friends that are willing to back him to the end of the Earth, but yeah, he’s, I’d say, winning.

There’s a version of this where you could straightforwardly make the argument that however many billions he lost on Twitter is worth it as an investment that got him to, “We’re going to do a trillion-dollar SpaceX IPO.”

Yeah, and I caution against looking back at it historically and thinking that was his plan all along. There is this trope that came up after Trump won the election that Elon Musk bought X to then help elect Donald Trump. There was really no proof of that, especially when we did our reporting at The Times and for our book Character Limit, but it has worked out for him. It’s indisputable in that sense.

He has bought a distribution platform for his own tweets. He’s the most followed person on the platform now. He controls the algorithm, he controls the content that gets boosted on the platform. I don’t know how to say this more, but he’s winning and that’s just where we are right now in society.

In the pre-X days when it was still Twitter, Elon would constantly talk about how he didn’t do any marketing for Tesla. They had spent no money in advertising, no money in marketing. He would just tweet to move Tesla sales up and down. And there was infinite demand for the Tesla Model 3 in particular and the Model Y. So much so that every other car maker essentially got confused and made Tesla Model Ys of their own.

They just thought people wanted electric cars. And maybe they just wanted Tesla’s and maybe there was a meme stock component to it, but Elon was just very good at using Twitter to drive demand for his products. He would constantly say, “I don’t have to pay for marketing. I just have this platform.”

The other part of my thesis was that buying X and changing the algorithm and being as political as he has been would cause reputational damage to Elon, would cause reputational damage to his companies. There’s some evidence that that is true in the case of Tesla, where the cars are less popular than they once were, certainly. There are campaigns to protest at Tesla dealerships. Is that true for SpaceX? Is it true for the rest of his empire?

It’s a great question. And with Tesla, of course, after the election, you saw the Tesla Takedown protests, people slapping those bumper stickers on their cars: “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” You could see the share of the Tesla market in the EV market falling. Of course, there’s a lot to do with the rise of Chinese vehicle manufacturers like BYD.

But I don’t know. I don’t think I see the same kind of reputational harm to SpaceX that I’ve seen with Tesla. And that may be because there’s just not as much consumer contact with parts of SpaceX. I think of something like the launch business. I’m not going out and buying a launch. Regular people aren’t buying launches; SpaceX is contracting with governments and big companies. Not to mention that they largely have a monopoly on getting things into space.

If your option is working with a company that has a CEO that is reputationally compromised versus not getting into space at all, you’ll probably go with the former. Starlink is another basket. It offers a product that is quite good and is not challenged in any way. I think of something like Iridium, for example, or the companies it competes against, and it just blows them out of the water. It’s such a strong service, so much so that governments rely on it and Ukraine relies on it and the numbers there continue to grow. That’s the crown jewel of the SpaceX business empire right now in terms of revenue and profit.

There’s no moral case to be made for being on Hughesnet still. You can’t be a better person by being on some of the other satellite providers that service the rural parts of the country. We see it in our own traffic and our own comments. We cover Starlink. There’s nothing better. They continue to innovate in the ways they continue to innovate and the audience doesn’t like it, but then there’s a huge part of the audience that says, “Wait, I don’t have a market alternative to this.”

You’re saying where there isn’t a market alternative, the reputational issues have not been a problem and every place where there might be or there’s a consumer market, the reputational issues have damaged it. I think X is actually the example of this. There are a number of market alternatives to X, so people have just left the platform.

Whether or not there’s one big competitor to X remains to be seen. Threads by some accounts is vastly bigger than X, but it does not have the influence. Bluesky is run by very charming, very ideological people. They’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. It’s certainly not a competitor head up to X. Is there a reason that influence hasn’t recapitulated itself anywhere, or that the people still on X have stayed there?

Oh man, it’s something I think about a lot and I think the rumors of X’s demise at the time were greatly exaggerated in a way. These social platforms are so sticky. I remember one of the rounds of layoffs, I think it was the “A Fork in the Road” or one of those earlier rounds, and Twitter went down for a period of time, too. I remember being at dinner and everyone just writing eulogies for Twitter that night. And I’m like, “Guys, I don’t think this is it.”

This is a pretty resilient platform. It’s been developed over more than a decade. It’s been around for a while. It’s quite a resilient thing and it has a dedicated user base. That’s why we love it. It’s a great social experiment. At the time, I was wary of being like, “This is the end of Twitter.” And you’re starting to see now just how resilient it is.

We’re so caught up in it as reporters. We’re on it all the time. But there are normal people out there that still go to X because their soccer community is on it. Or it’s where they talk about movies and they have their six best friends there. It’s still a very sticky platform, in spite of the CSAM from Grok or the abusive stuff from Elon or the hate speech. They persist because it’s just where they’ve learned to be. It’s hard to generate that from scratch, and I think that’s why you’re seeing things like Bluesky hit a ceiling here in terms of attracting a wider audience.

Do you think as we go into the IPO and SpaceX becomes a public company and X is just one piece of the puzzle, that it increases or decreases in importance to Elon? It is his favorite thing. But running a public rocket company is just a very different set of priorities.

Maybe, but also he never operates as we expect him to. Running Tesla and having a Twitter account have not worked out well for him in the past. He’s been sued for some of the stuff he’s put on Twitter. I think of 2018 when he got sued for saying funding was secured for taking Tesla private. And he paid $20 million in a fine and largely got away with it.

He’s way more powerful now and way richer than ever. So I don’t think SpaceX being a public company will necessarily change his habits on X these days. The other day I saw him posting about the Anthropic deal. I don’t know if you saw that. That was in the S-1 and he was pushing back on the idea that Anthropic would pay this amount of money for a certain amount of years, this large amount of revenue, about $1.25 billion a year.

He was openly contradicting what was in the company’s IPO documents, which you cannot do during a quiet period. I don’t think anything’s going to come of that. I don’t think he’ll get a slap on the wrist or anything. He’s just higher than any form of accountability right now.

That brings us to the larger SpaceX IPO in general, because the whole thing is structured to avoid the mechanisms of accountability that usually exist in our markets. It’s going to end up on the NASDAQ in some way, shape or form in a way that basically all of us are going to end up invested in SpaceX.

And we can’t take our dollars away because it’ll be in index funds. Elon is going to control an enormous part of the company in a way that maybe he just can never be removed. Who knows if even having a board of directors is important in that case. And then he has a monopoly on rocket launches, at least for now, and who knows if there will be market alternatives that provide accountability to SpaceX.

Walk us through how this is structured. You’ve written about it at length that the SpaceX IPO is a corporate governance disaster, if you care about corporate governance. Walk us through it.

I’m a big corporate governance guy myself.

[Laughs] It is the hottest. It’s what all the TikTok dances are about lately.

Yeah, I have a corporate governance tattoo on my lower back. But no, this is serious stuff and it’s concerning to people that study corporate governance. So let’s talk about Elon Musk’s ownership of the company and his voting control of the company.

He has super-voting shares that, all told, give him about 85 percent control of votes at the company. And that’s a super-supermajority at this point. He basically controls every corporate decision at the share voting level. I think of something like Meta, for example, and compare that to Mark Zuckerberg. With super voting and voting agreements, Zuckerberg controls about 60 percent. Elon has even a larger stranglehold on his company than that. What does that mean? It means he controls the board, he appoints friends and advisors to board seats.

There’s no independent board commission to structure pay packages. Essentially he has control over how he gets compensated. I wrote about this pay package that he got earlier this year where he was awarded 1.3 billion shares in what’s called restricted stock.

If you actually look at the footnotes there in that S-1, you could see that he’s already able to vote that stock, which is insane and it’s unheard of. He hasn’t earned any of these shares and these shares are pegged to hitting milestones with the company, like creating a colony on Mars with a million people and putting data centers in space with, I think, 100 terawatts of compute a year, just an astronomical figure.

He has to hit these things in order to gain these shares to sell them. Well, he hasn’t hit any of these milestones and he’s able to vote these already given the stipulations that were put on them from management.

Can I ask you about this, the colony on Mars? This is all bananas, right?

I guess we’re burying the lede here, yeah.

He gets a huge pay package if he puts a colony on Mars with a million people in it and puts however many terawatts of compute in space. He’s in charge of this S-1. He obviously wrote it to his own specifications. Why set milestones that are unachievable and then vote the stock anyway instead of just giving yourself the stock?

Good question. Maybe it gives it some semblance that he has to work towards these goals, but if you talk to corporate governance folks, they’re appalled that he gets to vote these anyways. This adds to his voting control, that 85 percent we talked about earlier. On top of that, he gets to take out loans against these shares. Of course that comes with board approval, but he controls the board. So he’s able to take out loans against these shares and get cash. And yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know why he’s even playing this dance of “I have to hit these milestones.”

My theory is that it’s so he can tweet about them. Legitimately, my theory is that he wants to be able to say, “I don’t get paid unless I put a million people on Mars.” Regardless of the technical details of whether he can vote the shares or take out loans against them as collateral. He gets to represent to the world, “I don’t receive the windfall until there are a million people on Mars.”

That’s a great point. There’s also a fun little wrinkle here in that you don’t pay taxes on them until you earn them. And so because he hasn’t earned them, because he doesn’t technically hold them yet or doesn’t have the ability to sell them, it’s not taxable. He doesn’t have to pay taxes on that either until he hits his milestones. In some ways, if you believe he’ll never hit them, he can still derive the power and potentially financial gain from it simply by holding them, or having this pay package under his thumb.

The usual way that a market could correct this is by a bunch of people telling retail investors, “Don’t invest in this IPO.” Or a bunch of people who are angry at Elon Musk selling their Teslas and telling their friends not to buy this IPO and driving their stock price down. That is a market corrective. We can see this happen with a variety of companies over time.

This IPO is going to end up in index funds very quickly in a way that I think is also terrifying a bunch of corporate governance experts, the sexiest new characters in American politics. Talk about that. How are we going to mechanically all end up owning SpaceX whether we want to or not?

This is the most underplayed and insane thing to think about. So how does this work? Maybe you and I take a look at the SpaceX IPO and we say, “I don’t like those financials. I personally would not invest in that company. I’m not going to buy shares through my Robinhood account or Schwab account.”

But let’s say we also have investments in index funds. We all have retirement accounts, and sometimes they’re invested in index funds. So we’re just passive investors in stock and these index funds trace the American industry by buying up shares in various stocks. So what’s happening here is that SpaceX and these indices have worked together to relax some of the rules. Let’s take the NASDAQ-100, for example. The NASDAQ-100 has 100 stocks in it that trace American industry, like blue chip stocks.

Typically, it takes about 90 days for a company after its IPO to enter the NASDAQ-100, or to be allowed into the NASDAQ-100. The reason for that is it allows for some type of cooling period. Typically, after an IPO’s stocks go up and down, it takes some time to settle on the public market and to have a steady valuation, and that’s normal.

In this case, SpaceX gets to enter the index after 15 days, in the midst of this very big hype cycle. That’s essentially going to force a lot of these index funds to buy up SpaceX shares because it has entered the index. That will give SpaceX access to a lot of capital it would have had to have waited for for a couple of months. And that’s going to continue to drive the buying frenzy in the stock. It’s genius in a way, from SpaceX’s perspective, to get that access to billions of dollars of capital in some of these index funds, and that’s just one way the rules have been relaxed for this IPO.

How did that occur? Did Elon just roll up to all the index fund owners and say, “Pretty please?” Did you buy them off? Was it above board? Was it corrupt?

Basically it’s been pretty opaque, but these things were simply announced. There have been rules around profitability that have been relaxed as well at some of these indices. There have been rules around governance that have been relaxed as well.

What I’m seeing here, what I’ve talked to folks about, is just this level of hype has generated so much FOMO around this stock, this fear of missing out. You get to the point where these rules are being thrown out. I talked to one corporate governance expert who said it’d be like having all the rules and setting aside all the rules for football. And you play with the rules of football and you’ve perfected it and you have it down to the rules of the game and then when you get to the Super Bowl, the biggest event of the year, you change those rules. And that’s what we’re seeing here with SpaceX.

There are a lot of people who root against the Kansas City Chiefs who understand exactly what you’re talking about in very specific ways.

[Laughs] It’d be like taking the tush push out of the NFL.

Well, I get it, but it’s also one of the biggest IPOs. The banks have all been listed on the IPO. They’re all participating in it. Is it just as simple as they all want the business, or do they also have some amount of influence over the index funds so that they’re just changing the rules?

Yeah. I think of this quote from a story that two of my colleagues wrote last week for The Times. There’s this one fund manager who simply said, “If I miss out on the SpaceX IPO, someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder and ask me why I wasn’t in that. Whereas if I get burned on the SpaceX IPO, so many other people are going to get burned as well. So I have a way to cover my ass.”

You’re just reading this quote and thinking, “What is going on here? He’s just admitting to a herd mentality here.” That’s what we’re seeing. Now multiply that by every retail investor who’s getting marketing materials on Robinhood telling him, “Oh, we have IPO shares available in SpaceX, buy, buy, buy.” It’s unheard of.

One of the things that really strikes me about that is the normal market dynamic is some people would obviously heavily bet on SpaceX succeeding and some people would heavily bet against it and you want that dynamic to find the right price for this. Here that just seems to be erased.

I’ll be interested in the short interest against this stock. I think that’ll be very interesting. But if you look at Elon’s track record, let’s say with Tesla for example, and how the stock has gone up over the years there, he’s completely crushed a lot of shorts there. He used to go to war against them, and he used to tweet about them all the time, but the best way to beat short sellers is to continue to increase the value of the stock, which Tesla has done over the years.

There’s just a meme-ification of this whole thing. This is not just a hype stock, but a meme stock in some ways, and that’s what happens when you have a celebrity CEO like this running a company.

That’s what’s really interesting to me because the car sales are falling. The product is not as successful as it once was. In many cases, the products are old. The Model S and Model X are being discontinued because they’re so old and he doesn’t want to spend money updating them.

Now, he’s promising robotics and robotaxis and a bunch of other things that may never come to pass. Is he going to be able to pull the same move with SpaceX? Just continually promise something bigger to come in the future that changes the value dynamic with the company?

He is right now as we speak. What happened at the beginning of this year? SpaceX was going along its way. It was a launch business with rockets that have self-landing capabilities and a really good business in Starlink. And what did he do? He combined it with xAI and said, “Actually, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to put data centers into space and this is the future. And oh, by the way, we’re going to put a factory on Mars to build these satellites to launch into space. And then we’ll get to the Mars colony.”

These are goals that have come up within the last year. He didn’t talk about these things previously. In the same way at Tesla where he has completely pivoted the company towards robots and the humanoid whatever things, you’re getting the same effect at SpaceX where he’s just selling people on a completely different bill of goods.

It’s just so interesting. I look at some of the contradictions he’s made over the years. There’s a tweet of his that he put up probably a year ago where he said, “The Moon doesn’t matter, we’re not focused on the Moon, we’re focused on Mars.” And then you go back and you look at the IPO documents and what he said more recently in the last couple of months and now they’re all in on the Moon. And that’s because NASA has put a renewed focus on the Moon and there’s money there.

So yeah, if you’re going off of what Elon says, it is whichever way the wind blows at this point and thus far that’s worked for him. People are willing to go with him and believe in him.

Here we are, a half hour into a conversation about the SpaceX IPO and we’re going to talk about the fundamentals of the SpaceX business because that’s about where it ranks. It’s like the 15th thing on the priority list when you talk about the SpaceX IPO is the fundamentals of the business.

As you’ve said several times now, Starlink is the only profitable part of this business. It generated $11.4 billion in revenue last year. It goes up and down. Everything else is a gigantic money loser. The AI division had a deficit of $6.4 billion. The NASA contracts for launch lost $657 million.

Everything else is losing money and then Starlink is the business that’s growing and generating actual profits. I look at that, I think, “Boy, I’ve covered the broadband industry for a long time here at The Verge. AT&T and Verizon are not the world’s sexiest businesses. They’re not throwing off so much margin that you can lose $6 billion on AI for the rest of your life.”

How does that work? Is there more Starlink to be had? Are we going to rip up all the fiber in the world and we’ll all get satellites? How do you generate enough money with Starlink to pay for all of this other stuff?

Great question. I believe SpaceX thinks Starlink can continue to grow. There are a lot of markets that haven’t been tapped yet. I think of something like India, for example, where the company is heavily courting the Modi government there to allow them to operate in a country with 1.5 billion people. There are markets like that where it can access and continue to grow that roughly 10 million, I think, monthly active user base.

Can I push back on that just for one second?

Sure.

The Indian market is very complicated, but it is very well served by its own telecom providers. Reliance Jio is the winner in the Indian market and a huge number of people just have a cell phone as their primary connectivity device. They’re doing fine and it’s dirt cheap. Even if you’re excited about putting Starlink in that market, how do you compete against that? Is it possible? Have they laid out the case?

They have not. You can also argue that the revenue per user there is not going to be the same as it would be in the US or wherever else. But yeah, they’ve made the argument that as long as it continues to grow, it’s a good thing. They’ll continue to launch more satellites into space with these things and cover the world essentially.

SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell gave a presentation at Mobile World Congress earlier this year where she basically put out a hit on all these big telecoms. Online she’s compared herself or compared SpaceX to David versus Goliath, which is a convenient narrative where you have a $1.25 trillion David going against these supposed Goliaths here.

That’s the bull case for Starlink. But if you look at the other fundamentals of this, the spending on AI is quite nuts. It’s losing so much money on AI development. We haven’t even talked about the massive amount it has to pay for Cursor, which is a $60 billion deal. So you asked earlier, what are people investing in here? They’re investing in promises. There are no fundamentals here.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about profits and revenues and growth, but at the end of the day, most investors are betting on Elon’s words and his ability to sell them on this idea of putting data centers into space or getting people to Mars.

The AI piece is fascinating. They’re estimating that $22.7 trillion will be generated from enterprise AI.

Yeah, I want to talk about this TAM. It’s just insane.

TAM stands for total addressable market. It is $28 trillion, I think, maybe slightly more.

There’s a great line in the S-1, which says something like this is the largest TAM ever in human history. And I’m like, “Cool. Show me how you got there.” And it’s just like, “Trust me, bro.” It’s like, “We got this. We did the numbers and it’s $23 trillion in AI and $3 trillion in rocket launches.” I don’t know where the fundamentals are for that. What are they basing that on? Sure, it’s in their S-1, but it’s a lot of “trust me” at this point.

The case for this is going to be a great IPO because SpaceX figured out the Falcon 9 and rocket reusability and they essentially have a monopoly on launched services in the United States, at least until Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin figure out whatever they’re going to figure out. That’s a pretty good case. I can see that case.

Starlink is a growing business. We are essentially the default government contractor for a very important mission both in national security and telecom and everything else we use satellites for. I see all of that.

Why add on this totally illusory enterprise $22.7 trillion from AI when you’re up against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google? And Elon has admitted very publicly that xAI was not built correctly and needs to be totally rebuilt. Now, he’s selling compute capacity to Anthropic on the side.

TAM says everything. It shows where they think the addressable market is, which is in AI. And all the hype right now is around AI, with OpenAI and Anthropic both expected to go public or at least file to go public. Anthropic did that today. I think Elon saw that. And if you had just taken the old SpaceX business public, what does that look like? That’s the launch business and that’s Starlink, that’s a solid business, right?

Is it a $1.25 to $1.5 trillion business? No. But if you layer on all these promises of, “Actually, we control getting things into space so we’re going to control getting data centers into space, and we’re going to own all the data centers in space and everyone’s going to have to rely on us to power the future of the American economy,” that’s a much more bullish proposition. It’s also a much more valuable proposition and one that you can raise a lot more money on.

Elon sees this as a singular opportunity to raise money. We’re talking about $50 to $75 billion in cash raised. That outstrips the current largest IPO, which was Saudi Aramco that raised almost $30 billion a couple of years ago. If you layer AI on top of that, you get a lot of this hype that he can sell into and raise all that cash.

What does he want to do with that cash?

Of course, get people to Mars.

Obviously.

[Laughs] Of course, easy. Once you have $50 billion, you can land a million people on Mars. Yeah, these are expensive propositions. Building Starship is an expensive proposition. Building data centers on Earth is an expensive proposition, as is buying up all that compute, buying up talent, and buying companies like Cursor. He needs that cash to do all those things and continue building up Musk Inc. It’s not like they’re going to sit on this cash pile for a long time.

It occurs to me that Elon does not enjoy normal rich guy activities. He’s not buying boats. He doesn’t have a fleet of cars. He does have a lot of children. They’re expensive. I’ve got two. They seem very expensive. I can use $50 billion just for that. The AI piece of it is confusing to me because it doesn’t seem like there’s evidence that Elon’s AI efforts are competitive.

They’re competitive in the fact that Grok has distribution on X and I think a lot of these companies would love to have distribution that way. The fact that X users can just talk to Grok whenever they want, to do some unsavory things, but they still have distribution. Claude does not have that distribution. But Anthropic is ahead in coding.

Anthropic is ahead in a lot of places. OpenAI has mindshare. Google has distribution in every way it can possibly have distribution. It’s going to power the next version of Siri for Apple. How do you win? How do you raise all this money and say, “We’re going to have a $22 trillion enterprise service at market,” when no one in AI thinks you’re even close to the lead right now. Can you just buy the talent?

xAI is clearly behind in the model war. I saw this great tweet the other day that if Claude is Coca-Cola and OpenAI is Pepsi, then Grok is the RC Cola.

I knew you were going to say RC Cola and I was pre-offended.

[Laughs] Oh, no. Are you an RC Cola fan? I could go with Faygo for the Juggalos out there and I’m sure there’s a lot of Juggalos that like using Grok.

But it’s the fourth- or fifth- or sixth-best model, at least in terms of popularity. Can you build a business around that? Can that business be worth trillions of dollars? Probably not. And there’s some admission from Elon that, or there has been admission from Elon that it hasn’t gone as well.

You mentioned how he said the company wasn’t built right. You look at the Cursor acquisition they’re trying to pay for to get back in the game. You also look at this very interesting deal that the company has with Anthropic to rent out its compute from one of its main data centers that it built in Tennessee.

Colossus has two data centers, Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. It has since rented out one of these to Anthropic in a $1.25 billion a month deal. Anthropic is paying that much to get access to that compute. You’d probably argue that if everything was going swell at Grok and at xAI that they’d be using all that compute to push their own models and help their own customers. But in this case, it’s become sort of an AWS-type service where it’s renting out its space and that’s a good business. I’m not going to deny that, who wouldn’t want $1.25 billion a month in revenue? But it’s not what that thing was built for in the first place.

Is there a way back for them to lead at the frontier? Is it, “We’re going to raise $50 billion and maybe we’ll just hire everybody from OpenAI”?

Potentially. And if you look at some of the comments last week from Elon on X where he pushed back on the idea that that Anthropic deal would be for the next three years, he said, “We reserve the right to take some of that compute back.”

He’s suggesting maybe their models get good again to the point where they’ll need that compute. He changes with the wind and his business plan changes with the wind. We’ve seen that in the last six months to a year, these completely new businesses are coming out of nowhere. I don’t think there’s ever a “never” or a “never again” for Elon, and I guess he reserves the right to return to that at some point.

I want to end where we started, which is in 2022 when Elon buys Twitter and renames it X. It’s now famously the “everything app.” We’re clearly all doing our payments there all day long. You wrote a whole book about it. I made the prediction that buying Twitter would trash his reputation and maybe harm his companies.

Here we are now on the cusp of what might be one of the biggest IPOs in history. And it seems like in order to make it work, all of the rules of the game have had to be changed or rigged to favor Elon. If we were operating in a normal circumstance with the normal rules, with the normal index fund seizing rules, and he had to wait 90 days for profitability and people are looking at the actual fundamentals of this business, do you think there’s a chance that this IPO is as big as it’s going to end up being?

Probably not as big. It’s hard to say. I still think there would be an incredible amount of hype around this company. You just don’t get this type of excitement for any CEO beyond Elon Musk. For a lot of people, they don’t necessarily pay attention to his politics or his everyday posting on Twitter, his hate speech or whatever thing he’s concocting on the platform. They see him as a successful businessman, a generational talent that put Teslas on the roads, and they see that every day.

They see that as a chance to invest in him. There would still be a large amount of retail, obviously not the same amount as having to force index funds to buy into a company. But that alone might drive a lot of success for this IPO. Again, it’s a completely hypothetical situation. We’ll have to see in two weeks.

I’m very curious. Do you think there are any other correctives? We’ve talked about the market correctives, you talked about the index rules, you talked about the corporate governance issues. Are there any other correctives here, or are we just along for the ride?

Oh man, I’ve thought about accountability for Elon for a long time. That’s the point of our book. How do you hold someone that rich accountable? And I just think the normal levers of accountability for someone like that have gone out the window. Yeah, we’re along for the ride.

I have one example in this IPO, which is if you’re a shareholder in SpaceX, you agree to arbitration for any issues around if you believe some kind of fraud or violation of securities law has happened. In the past, Elon has faced lawsuits from shareholders at Tesla and Twitter. At SpaceX, he’s essentially removed that ability to pursue those types of shareholder lawsuits.

He’s stacking the deck for himself here and removing any of the obstacles he could face as a public company CEO and entrenched himself in this company, built a pretty big moat around himself. The impact of that will be seen for years to come.

Well, Ryan, it feels like no matter what, you and I are both going to end up as SpaceX shareholders. So I’ll see you at the next meeting. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. This is great.

Thanks for having me. I’ll see you on Mars.

[Laughs] One million strong, bro.

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In This Article

Echo eForce 56V Power Pruner

Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless 1-Gal. Air Compressor Kit

Husky 9-Drawer Mobile Workbench

DeWalt Cordless Power Cleaner

Nexgrill 4-Burner Propane Gas Grill

Dremel Multi-Max Oscillating Tool Kit

Husky 280-Piece SAE/Metric Mechanics Tool Set

DeWalt Sliding Compound Miter Saw

Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless 6-Tool Combo Kit

DeWalt 10-Inch Table Saw and Rolling Stand

More Gifts for Father’s Day We Love

SHOW 8 MORE

There are few stores that can compete with The Home Depot when it comes to gifts for Dad. From tools and storage to grilling and drinks, The Home Depot has a broad variety of appealing products and gifts that are perfect for Father’s Day. Whether you decide to head to your local Home Depot or simply navigate to the Home Depot website, don’t miss out on these amazing Father’s Day gifts this year so you can show the father in your life just how much you appreciate him and all that he does for you.

Echo eForce 56V Power Pruner

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

When the trees and bushes are a mess, the tool your father needs most is a versatile power pruner for all-purpose landscape use. As one of the best pole saws available, this Echo eForce pole saw allows users to reach branches up to 12 feet off the ground and it operates using a battery, rather than an extension cord, eliminating the risk of accidentally cutting or getting the tool tangled in the cord while your dad works.

What our tester says: “The eForce is a versatile pole saw, suitable for everything from cultivating a backyard orchard to performing regular pruning and general maintenance on a yard surrounded by encroaching trees. I cut more than 50 branches between 4 and 6 inches thick during testing, and the battery still showed a 50 percent charge afterward.”, Mark Wolfe, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the Echo eForce 56V Power Pruner at The Home Depot for $581.02.

Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless 1-Gal. Air Compressor Kit

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

While on its own even the best air compressor can’t do much, but when you pair it with any one of a wide variety of pneumatic tools, your dad will be able to drive nails, spray paint, fill tires, tighten bolts, and more. Operating on battery power, this Ryobi air compressor can be used out in the yard, up on the deck, or anywhere inside your home without worrying about a cord limiting the distance. It has a 1-gallon tank, produces 120 PSI max pressure, and has a CFM rating of 0.5 at 90 PSI, making it an excellent option for your father this Father’s Day.

What our tester says: “This little air compressor weighs just 14 pounds and comes with a padded nonslip handle for carrying. Both the battery and charger are included. In our testing, the battery ran for about 1 hour with constant use. You could expect to get more time out of it if you use it on a less constant basis, such as nailing brads for a few minutes and then measuring and cutting additional trim, which is more realistic.”, Glenda Taylor, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless Air Compressor Kit at The Home Depot for $268.00.

Husky 9-Drawer Mobile Workbench

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

No matter how organized the workshop, there never seems to be enough storage for all of your father’s various tools, so instead of adding to that tool collection this Father’s Day, consider getting him this high-quality, wheeled workbench with nine drawers for storing an assortment of tools and materials. The workbench includes an integrated power strip with six outlets and two USB ports, as well as a sturdy wooden top, providing 833 square inches of space for your dad’s projects.

Get the Husky 9-Drawer Mobile Workbench at The Home Depot for $448.00.

DeWalt Cordless Power Cleaner

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Make cleaning easier for your dad this Father’s Day with the DeWalt FlexVolt Power Cleaner. This pressure washer is ideal for cleaning small, lightweight items and sensitive surfaces, like the siding on the house, the deck, driveway, walkway, and more. It comes with a quick-connect wand, turbo nozzle, 15-degree nozzle, 25-degree nozzle, 40-degree nozzle, soap cannon, shoulder strap, suction hose, and a mesh storage bag to hold everything when the power cleaner is not in use.

What our tester says: “The Flexvolt Cordless Power Cleaner can attach to a garden hose or other fresh water source for convenient outdoor cleaning in the palm of your hand. With a lot more oomph than a hose alone, it provided just the right amount of power for smaller projects and more delicate surfaces, like patio furniture and lawn equipment.”, Mark Wolfe, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the DeWalt Cordless Power Cleaner at The Home Depot for $399.00.

Nexgrill 4-Burner Propane Gas Grill

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Give the gift of good food and outdoor meals with this 4-burner propane gas grill by Nexgrill. There are few things fathers like better than standing out in the sun with the grill going and a drink in hand. This grill has a 566 square inch cooking area and cast iron cooking grates for strong heat retention, as well as an electric start, so your dad doesn’t need to rely on matches or a barbecue lighter to get started.

Get the Nexgrill 4-Burner Propane Gas Grill at The Home Depot for $199.00.

Dremel Multi-Max Oscillating Tool Kit

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Not all that long ago, Dremel was synonymous with oscillating tools, so it should come as no surprise that this Dremel oscillating tool kit is one of the best oscillating tools for your dad this Father’s Day. The battery-operated tool features a tool-free blade change system and a compact shape that makes it easier to use in narrow spaces. It boasts a variable speed of 10,000 to 20,000 OPM and comes with three blades, a battery, a charger, and a case.

What our tester says: “This is a top-notch oscillating tool, and the inclusion of the dust port really sets it above the others for working indoors. Dremel even sent two batteries, so we could load the fresh one and continue the test.”, Glenda Taylor, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the Dremel Multi-Max Oscillating Tool Kit at The Home Depot for $149.00.

Husky 280-Piece SAE/Metric Mechanics Tool Set

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Not every dad has a workshop packed with tools, so if your father is in need of a high-quality mechanics tool set, look no further than this 280-piece set made by Husky. The tool kit comes with a three-drawer storage box, highly organized drawers, and built-in handles on either side of the box for easy carrying. Within the kit, your dad will find 1/4″, 3/8″, and 1/2″ drive 72-tooth ratchets, 1/4″ drive sockets, 3/8″ drive sockets, bit sockets, 1/2″ drive sockets, drive extensions, combination wrenches, and more.

Get the Husky 280-Piece SAE/Metric Mechanics Tool Set at The Home Depot for $99.00.

DeWalt Sliding Compound Miter Saw

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Whether your dad is gearing up to tackle a deck building project, putting up a fence in the yard, or finishing the basement, having this impressive compound miter saw ready to go will help them make clean, precise, and repeatable cuts for both efficiency and accuracy. One of the best miter saws available, it also has a built-in LED light so they can see exactly what they are doing, even in a dark garage or workshop, as well as a dust collection bag to keep the area nice and clean while your father works.

What our tester says: “I cut several types of boards and trim on the DWS780, and this is a workhorse of a power miter saw. It’s heavy at 58 pounds, but it could be transported to a job or project site and mounted, where it would easily serve as the most important saw on the job.”, Glenda Taylor, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the DeWalt Sliding Compound Miter Saw at The Home Depot for $449.00.

Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless 6-Tool Combo Kit

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Instead of just one tool, why not get your father six with this combo kit that includes a 1/2 inch drill/driver, a 1/4 inch impact driver, a reciprocating saw, a 5-1/2 inch circular saw, an oscillating multi-tool, an LED Light, a battery, a charger, and a bag to store all the tools. This comprehensive set also includes many accessories for the tools, such as an 18T carbide blade, hex wrench, reciprocating saw blade, flush cut blade, plunge cut blade, and more.

Get the Ryobi One+ 18V Cordless 6-Tool Combo Kit at The Home Depot for $199.00.

DeWalt 10-Inch Table Saw and Rolling Stand

Photo: The Home Depot

Buy at The Home Depot

Photo: The Home Depot

Portability is a major benefit when your dad needs to haul around their table saw to tackle projects both inside and outside the home, so this high-quality table saw by DeWalt is an excellent option since it comes with a rolling stand and folding legs. The table saw has a maximum cut depth at 90 degrees of 3 ⅛ inches with a ripping capability of 22 inches to the left of the blade and 32 ½ inches to the right of the blade, making it a popular choice and one of the best portable table saws, even among trade professionals.

What our tester says: “In testing, we found that this was the most stable saw in the bunch, with an aggressive leg flare that would make tipping this thing over while cutting long, heavy stock nearly impossible. But it didn’t take up any more of a footprint than the other saws in the group.”, Mark Clement, Product Reviews tester and writer

Get the DeWalt Table Saw and Rolling Stand at The Home Depot for $699.99.

More Gifts for Father’s Day We Love

Visol Zippo Father’s Day Lighter at The Home Depot for $28.00: Classy and useful, this lighter is an excellent gift that your father can carry with them wherever they go.

Evergreen Grilling Apron and Oven Mitt Set at The Home Depot for $50.00: Outfit your dad this Father’s Day with this olive green grilling apron and oven mitt set

Husky Rechargeable Floating Spotlight at The Home Depot for $54.97: With IPX7 waterproofing and the ability to float, this flashlight is ideal for fishing, camping, and extreme weather conditions.

GearWrench 15-Piece Wrench Set at The Home Depot for $99.39: Pick up this long-handle combination wrench set made of alloy steel for your father with a simple storage and organization rack.

Stanley 65-Piece Tool Kit at The Home Depot for $63.54: Packed into a blow-molded case for easy storage, this set includes a variety of common tools, like a hammer, pliers, level, and screwdrivers.

Husky 18-Piece Hex Key Set at The Home Depot for $32.97: Instead of always struggling with the cheap hex keys included with furniture packs, get your dad this high-quality set of 18 non-slip hex keys.

Royal Gourmet Portable Propane Gas Griddle at The Home Depot for $102.00: With this portable propane grill, your dad can cook up veggies, pancakes, eggs, and more, while the side grease cup collects oil while they are cooking.

DeWalt 100-Foot Self-Leveling Laser Level at The Home Depot for $229.00: Your dad will be able to project bright green crossing horizontal and vertical lines for various leveling and layout applications, like cabinet installation or tile work.

Pure Garden 18-Piece Wood BBQ Grill Tool Set at The Home Depot for $19.10: Equip the grill-loving dad in your life with this beautiful wood and stainless steel set of rust-resistant cooking tools.

Numhew 6-Piece Old Fashioned Whiskey Glasses at The Home Depot for $127.99: There are few things as classy to get for Father’s Day as a set of heavy-duty whiskey glasses with a twisted rim design to both enhance the grip and the aesthetic appeal.

The post The 20 Best Father’s Day Gifts at The Home Depot appeared first on Bob Vila.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Marjane Satrapi, Author of PERSEPOLIS, Has Died at 56

Iranian French author Marjane Satrapi has passed away at 56. The cause and location of her death have not been shared, but one thing is certain: the world of graphic memoir has lost a giant. Satrapi’s best-known work, Persepolis, was published in the early 2000s and showed millions of readers the lives of everyday Iranians during the Islamic Revolution. As our Senior Editor Kelly Jensen stated, its blend of memoir, history, and stunning artwork has helped bring about our current, brilliant era of graphic memoir.

President Emmanuel Macron’s office released a statement on the author’s influence: “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim.”

Everand and Fable Merge Forces to Make One Mighty Subscription Service

Last year, Everand (an online book subscription service and subsidiary of Scribd) acquired Fable (a book club app), and now, the two are fully combining forces to make one bigger subscription service. Through the new service, Fable’s 5 million users and 200,000 book clubs will have access to more than 1.5 million ebooks and audiobooks, while Everand users will now have access to Fable’s advanced reading statistics, the ability to make goals, and can automatically carry over their reading progress and saved titles to Fable.

40 Literary Organizations to Receive $7.7 Million, Courtesy of The Literary Arts Fund

After an oppressive year under an art-hating (and just hateful in general) administration, we are so back! Well, not entirely, but this is a start: an endowment established last year is set to distribute $7.7 million to 40 independent and nonprofit literary organizations across 19 states. This initiative comes from The Literary Arts Fund, which itself was started by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and one anonymous foundation.

So far, recipients such as the National Book Foundation (which runs the National Book Awards), the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Graywolf Press, and Copper Canyon Press have received grants ranging from $40,000 to $500,000.

Pride is for Book Lovers: LGBTQ+ Romances Set in Bookstores and Libraries

One thing about me is that I love a bookish book, and reading about queer love found in bookstores and libraries feels extra cozy and sweet. Not only that, but reading these kinds of romances feels especially important now, with all of the book bans popping up that target books by and about the queer community. I suggest we all get good ‘n’ cozy with one or more of these romances, which take us everywhere, from 1960s New York City to Victorian London, and reach out to our representatives to stop HR 2616 (The “Don’t Say Trans” Bill) from becoming law. (Find your Senator here, and your House representatives here.)

Test Your Knowledge With This Quiz on Books That Changed the World

This week, The New York Times released a new quiz through its Lit Trivia series. It’s on books that have influenced society. One of these books furthered the Civil Rights Movement, another was an exposé on the funeral industry, and another is said to have started the environmental movement as we know it today. I can admit that I would have felt a certain type of way if I had gotten less than I did (3/5) on the quiz, given my job and everything.

But how did you do? Let us know in the comments!

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Thursday shared a major health update on her husband’s aggressive cancer battle.

The top Trump cabinet official revealed her husband, Abraham, was diagnosed with a “very rare” form of cancer called sacral chordoma. The slow-growing bone cancer typically starts in the bones of the spine or skull, according to the Mayo Clinic.  The disease can grow anywhere along the spine and mostly affects adults ages 40 to 60, with surgery as “the main treatment.”

On Thursday, Gabbard took to X to provide an encouraging update on Abraham’s course of treatment.

“The surgery to remove bone and surrounding tissue lasted almost seven hours and was successful,” Gabbard said. “He had a rough night and is in a lot of pain, but is finally home resting.”

My husband Abraham was diagnosed with a very rare sacral chordoma. The surgery to remove bone and surrounding tissue lasted almost seven hours and was successful. He had a rough night and is in a lot of pain but is finally home resting. Now recovery begins. We’re so grateful…

, Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) June 4, 2026

“Now recovery begins. We’re so grateful for the outpouring of prayers and kind messages from all of you. Our hearts are full,” she added.

Gabbard previously shared a heartfelt message on social media as the couple headed to the hospital for surgery.

“We are humbled and so grateful to be surrounded by aloha during this really tough time,” she said.

We are getting ready to head to the hospital for my husband’s surgery and just wanted to say thank you so much to all of who have shared messages, prayers and well wishes for Abraham. We are humbled and so grateful to be surrounded by aloha during this really tough time. 🙏🏽 pic.twitter.com/EpDcRqv8FV

, Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) June 2, 2026

In May, Gabbard announced she was stepping down to support her husband through a battle with “an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”

“My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” she wrote. “He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”

On Truth Social, President Trump praised Gabbard for doing “an incredible job.”

Vice President Vance called her a “patriot” and a “great asset” to the White House.

“I’m sorry to see her go, but certainly understand that family comes first. She and her husband Abraham, will be in my prayers as they face this next challenge together, and she has my gratitude for being a great addition to the administration and a loyal confidante,” he said. “Godspeed Tulsi!”

In 2024, Gabbard, a former Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman, made waves when she crossed over to support President Trump’s re-election campaign. Her last day is expected to be June 30.

The White House on Tuesday tapped Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William J. “Bill” Pulte to fill the role.

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In a world that seems increasingly determined to keep us apart, we’re all still bound together by one universal experience: the frustration of trying to reach a real person on the phone at a customer service call center. Whether we want to complain, resolve a problem, or simply get information, call center interactions can be a maddening experience. Companies are increasingly hiding their customer service representatives behind phone menus and AI-driven tools, and even if you make contact, the experience is often less than ideal. With Prime Day around the corner, finding a method to get help from someone at Amazon can save you a lot of headaches, but the following strategies can work with most any company.

While different companies handle their call centers in different ways (and host them in different countries), there are some universal truths to keep in mind, and use to your advantage, if you know the secret ways to navigate them. These tips won’t guarantee you success in your quest for a refund, a return, or simply an explanation as to why you were shipped a Taylor Swift-branded body pillow instead of the winter coat you ordered. But they will increase your odds of emerging from the call with something to show for your efforts.

A good general piece of advice: Keep calm, and always be polite. Call center employees are human beings doing a difficult job, so remind yourself that your beef isn’t with them, it’s with their corporate overlords.

GetHuman

Your chances of customer service success increase dramatically when you get a human being on the line. Hitting a rigid phone menu is pretty common these days, and it’s frustrating: The automated options often aren’t flexible enough to cover your specific need, and they seem to be designed to stop all but the hardiest souls from actually reaching a customer service rep (CSR).

And that’s because they are. It costs money every time you connect with a CSR, so companies try to keep you away from them as much as possible. So, instead of tangling with their phone menu and hearing “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that” fifteen times until you set your phone on fire in frustration, try a service like GetHuman. Type in the name of the company you’re trying to contact and see if there’s a direct phone number you can dial to get a person, or if they offer a set of easy instructions on how to break out of the phone menu. If you do get a human on the phone, ask for a direct number to call back if your problem needs to be addressed again.

The supervisor trick

It’s an oldie but a goodie, and it does work. If your CSR isn’t helpful, or you’re not getting the result you want, ask to speak to a supervisor. A slightly more polite and less combative way to do this is to ask to speak to “someone who can solve my problem” or similar language. In almost all situations, your CSR is obligated to transfer you upon request, and supervisors are often empowered to do things the common CSR can’t.

Hit zero, or say nothing

If you can’t get any information on how to connect to a human being, try pressing zero on your phone’s keypad. Many (though not all) call center phone menus will automatically dump you to a CSR if you press zero.

If that doesn’t work, have a little patience and simply do nothing. Most phone menus will time out if you don’t respond in any way to their prompts, and dump you to a human being by default. This might take a minute or two, but it often works.

Call during off-peak hours

As you might imagine, call centers experience busy times like any other business, and they tend to align with people’s waking hours. If the company you’re trying to reach offers 24-hour customer service, try calling very early in the morning or very late at night. Most sane, well-adjusted people will be asleep or enjoying their lives, so your chances of getting through quickly (and your chances the CSR will have extra time for you) will be better.

Exhaust the script

It’s important to understand that every single CSR you speak to is working from a script. Companies develop complex algorithms for dealing with customer complaints. These scripts are designed to shorten call lengths, and to avoid outcomes the company finds undesirable (like refunding your money).

But like all scripts, they’re limited. A few simple tricks can help you break free from the script, and that’s when you can really get something done. A few things to try:

Repeat your demands. CSR scripts usually have a limit on how often the CSR can refuse you, but they won’t tell you that. Most commonly, if you trigger the same script loop three times, the CSR is obliged to transfer you, or empowered to reveal another option they’ve yet to share. So if the CSR tells you they can’t refund you, don’t just accept it, ask again. And then again.

Stay on the line. CSRs are always on the clock. Every interaction costs the company money, and their job performance is often tied to how quickly they can resolve customer problems. The longer you refuse to end the interaction, the closer you get to being transferred to someone who can actually do what you want, or inspiring the CSR to use some of the power they do have just to get you off the line.

Jump the script. When trying to cancel an account or get a refund, CSR scripts are larded with alternatives, up-sells, and misdirections. (Ever tried to cancel your cable TV and somehow wound up with three months of free HBO instead? That’s the power of the script.) One trick is to start off by pre-refusing everything, tell the CSR you don’t want freebies, discounts, new services, or anything else, you want one very specific thing. This can short-circuit the script and get you where you want to go much faster.

Call back immediately

If your CSR refuses to see things your way, don’t get mad, change venues. Politely end the call, then call back immediately. You’ll almost certainly get a different CSR, and the experience can often be dizzyingly different. That’s because your call may be routed to an entirely different call center, or may be picked up by a CSR with more experience, and more authority.

Show them the money

If you’re having trouble getting a human being on the line no matter what you try, there’s one last trick to play: Choose the menu option that involves spending money. Upgrade your account, make a purchase, take on the optional insurance, whatever option results in your bill going up will almost certainly get an eager human being on the phone. They may not be the right person to speak to, but now you’re inside the phone menu, and they can transfer you to a more appropriate department.

Customer service often seems like a battle of wills. But it’s also a battle of wits, and these secrets will give you some extra ammo.

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In the four-second video clip from last December, an unmarked law enforcement truck with tinted windows rolls down a residential street in Memphis, Tennessee, and a voice says wryly over the truck's loudspeaker, "Good job, Hunter."

"Hunter," was Hunter Demster, the man who was filming, and the fact that the federal agents inside the truck knew his name made him anxious. Demster had spent the past several months following and recording the Memphis Safe Task Force, a multi-agency task force of federal and state law enforcement, and he had been facing escalating hostility and intimidation from officers. Demster would later write in a court declaration that the sarcastic comment and the message behind it, we know your name, made him question whether it was worth it.

Demster is now the lead plaintiff in a First Amendment lawsuit, and the video is part of a tranche of exhibits in support of allegations that Task Force members illegally retaliate against observers who record their activities. Demster and eight other Memphis residents filed declarations in federal court last week that describe being violently arrested, surveilled at their houses, pulled over under false pretenses, boxed in by police cars, and jailed for trying to film the Task Force.

The lawsuit, filed in mid-May by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU Foundation of Tennessee, Selendy Gay PLLC, and BraunHagey & Borden LLP, is seeking a preliminary injunction blocking Task Force officers from intimidating, assaulting, or arresting people for recording. The proposed injunction would also ban Task Force officers from invoking a new state law against videographers that requires bystanders to stay 25 feet away from police.

The lawsuit is a major legal challenge to what the ACLU and organizations such as the libertarian Cato Institute argue is an unofficial and unconstitutional Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy that treats recording the police like criminal activity. (In fact, as evidence of this, the ACLU lawsuit cites a previous DHS statement to Reason that following or recording federal law enforcement officers "sure sounds like obstruction of justice.")

Although the Supreme Court hasn't directly addressed the issue, seven federal circuit courts have firmly upheld the right to record and monitor the police, so long as one doesn't physically interfere with them. However, over the past two years videos from around the country, from Oregon to Maine to the Florida Keys, have shown federal immigration agents arresting or threatening to arrest people for filming them.

Scarlet Kim, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in a press release that this pattern is especially evident in Memphis, where the Task Force has launched a "campaign of harassment and intimidation" against observers.

"What we're seeing in Memphis is the systematic repression of the First Amendment right to peacefully observe, gather information about, and film government officials operating in public," Kim said in a press release. "No one should have their personal safety or privacy compromised simply for bringing to light what Task Force agents are doing on the streets of Memphis."

According to Demster's declaration, he had been documenting immigration enforcement in Memphis and providing Know Your Rights information in his neighborhood for roughly a decade when the Trump administration and State of Tennessee launched the Task Force last September. Demster wrote that his goal is "to bear witness to Task Force activity and hold Task Force agents accountable to the public, including by identifying Task Force agents and agencies operating in my community."

However, Demster said he was continually stymied by interference and intimidation from Task Force officers. Demster wrote that officers got in his face, shone their flashlights at him to ruin his footage, erratically swerved their cars toward where he was standing, and ordered him to move so far away that he was unable to see what was occurring. Demster wrote that on several occasions, he returned home to find an unmarked police car idling outside his house.

On December 12, 2025, Demster was pulled over by a Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) officer and several unmarked law enforcement vehicles. Demster wrote that at least six Task Force agents surrounded his car while the THP officer wrote him a bogus ticket for a broken taillight. According to his declaration, when Demster later showed up to traffic court, he was told that the ticket had never been filed in the system.

Jessica Chodor, one of the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, was violently arrested on October 28 of last year while attempting to film a Task Force traffic stop.

A THP officer at the scene ordered Chodor to go back to her car, but Chodor instead said she was moving across the street to a public sidewalk.

"You're going back there to your car or you're going to jail," the THP officer told her.

When Chodor insisted she wasn't legally obligated to go back to her car, the officer grabbed her.

"[The Task Force agent] tackled me to the ground with immense force," Chodor wrote in her declaration. "Once I was on the ground, he and another person pinned me to the ground facedown. I was shocked and scared. I did not know what was happening or understand that they were arresting me, because I hadn't broken any laws and they did not tell me I was under arrest."

Chodor was incarcerated in the Shelby County Jail for 27 hours before being released. According to the lawsuit, she was charged with resisting official detention, but the charges were dismissed.

In addition, the lawsuit is challenging the Task Force's use of Tennessee's "Halo law," which makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a police officer when ordered to back away. Demster estimated in his declaration that Task Force members invoked the Halo law somewhere between 40 and 50 times to threaten him with arrest and move him more than 100 feet away from the scenes he was trying to record, well beyond the range where he could film anything.

Several other states such as Florida, Louisiana, Indiana, and Arizona have passed similar "buffer zone" laws in recent years. The bills' sponsors say that first responders shouldn't be harassed while on duty. However, civil liberties groups argue the laws have a chilling effect on the public's ability to document police activity. Arizona's law, for instance, was struck down by a federal judge in 2023 for being unconstitutionally overbroad.

"Despite the intimidation I have faced from the Task Force, I know that it's important to stand up for my rights," Demster said in an ACLU press release. "I have a constitutional right to observe Task Force agents without worrying that they might be surveilling my house or following my car. Documenting their activity and showing the world what is happening in Memphis is critical to holding them accountable, and I will use my voice and my platform to stand up for the First Amendment and for my neighbors."

The post Lawsuit Says a Memphis Police Task Force Waged a Harassment Campaign Against People Who Filmed Them appeared first on Reason.com.

Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs came to the defense of Tennessee fans on a popular Barstool Sports show, disagreeing with the notion that Vols fans are unpleasant to deal with.

A WWE hall-of-famer known by his ring name Kane, most of Jacobs' conversation with "Mostly Sports" hosts Brandon Walker and Mark Titus focused on his wrestling career. But when Walker turned the conversation to his opinion of Tennessee fans, calling them “overtly obnoxious," Jacobs disagreed.

“No we’re not,” Jacobs said. “We’re very nice. Have you ever been to Alabama or Gainesville?”

“Tennessee fans are overtly obnoxious” -@BFW

“No we’re not. We’re very nice” -@KaneWWE

“Online, Tennessee fans are the most obnoxious fans. And they want to be. They want the title of ‘we’re the most obnoxious fans” -@BFW

“I don’t think so” -@KaneWWEpic.twitter.com/wbaofX5JR1

, Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 3, 2026

Walker called back on his experience at Tennessee’s home football game against Ole Miss in 2021, when Lane Kiffin returned to Neyland Stadium as the Rebels’ coach after spurning Tennessee for Southern Cal in 2010 after just one with the Vols. Kiffin was infamously pelted in the leg by a yellow golf ball.

“And these are the fans you’re telling me aren’t obnoxious. The ones that were throwing golf balls,” Walker said.

“Well, it was Lane Kiffin,” Jacobs responded. “I’ve got to make an exception.”

Walker, a Mississippi State fan, agreed but said that Tennessee fans are the worst online. “They want the title of we’re the most obnoxious fans,” Walker said.

Jacobs again dissented, and after a brief discussion about Vols coach Josh Heupel, Jacobs was optimistic about Heupel’s program, the conversation steered back to wrestling.

Jacobs, who stands at 7-foot and over 300 pounds, first moved to East Tennessee in 1995 and briefly wrestled for Smoky Mountain Wrestling with the nickname Unabomb. He then began his career with WWF, later renamed WWE, in 1995, evolving into the character of Kane. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2021.

Jacobs has been Knox County’s mayor since 2018, succeeding current U.S. representative Tim Burchett. Jacobs won a second term, which ends in 2026.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs defends Tennessee fans on Barstool Sports

While there’s a tournament this week to focus on, the top two golfers in the world made a pit stop in Long Island on Monday.

Both Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy stopped to play Shinnecock Hills in New York, the site of the U.S. Open later this month, on Monday before arriving in Ohio for the Memorial Tournament.

“I hadn’t been there prior. That was my first time on property,” Scheffler said on Wednesday from Muirfield Village. “It was kind of what I expected. I had heard some rumors about how difficult the greens were. I was a little surprised at the width of the fairways, but the green complexes there are extremely difficult, and I think that’s where the greatest challenge comes from.”

Scheffler said he didn’t keep score on Monday. It’s unclear if he played with McIlroy, or if the two went out separately. But, with the major championship looming, both guys clearly thought it was important to stop by.

Scheffler, the top-ranked golfer in the world, picked up his 20th career PGA Tour win earlier this season at The American Express. He has three runner-up finishes this season, too, including at the Masters in April. He’s entering the Memorial Tournament this week coming off a third place finish at The CJ Cup.

Scheffler has won four major championships in his career, too, including at both the PGA Championship and the British Open last season. He’s now just a U.S. Open win away from completing the career grand slam, something McIlroy pulled off last year at Augusta National.

Though it’s not been as dominant as the past two seasons, Scheffler picked up seven wins in 2024 and six in 2025, he’s been right there.

“I would say this year has felt like I've been close,” he said. “I felt like I haven't been as sharp as I would have liked to have been. When you look at the margins in this game, they're quite small. I think statistically I'm probably not far off from where I've been the last couple years, it's just a couple shots here or there, a couple of those momentum shots where it can kind of swing you in a tournament … I’ve just got to get a touch sharper.”

McIlroy has been to Shinnecock before, but he missed the cut at the course the last time it hosted the U.S. Open back in 2018. Brooks Koepka ended up winning that season, but he did it with a 1-over final score.

“Shinnecock looks good. The fairways are very generous,” McIlroy said. “They’re more generous than they were in 2018 … If it’s set up the right way, I think it’s one of the best championship tests in the country. I mean, it’s an amazing golf course.”

Saints' Chris Olave reveals timeline for possible contract extension originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The New Orleans Saints have made a lot of investments in the offense this offseason, adding David Edwards and Travis Etienne Jr. in free agency and drafting Jordyn Tyson, Oscar Delp, and a few other receiver options in the 2026 NFL Draft.

All of those moves are made with the intention to help Tyler Shough develop into a true starting quarterback in the NFL. He showed potential in 2025 and hopefully will make a leap in 2026. Chris Olave is a big factor in Shough making such a jump.

With a contract extension and potential holdout looming later this season, the Saints and Olave must work something out. Fortunately, Olave revealed a timeline for an extension to WLL Radio recently that should be welcome news for Saints fans.

Saints' Chris Olave reveals extension timeline

"I feel like we're going to come down to that before training camp," Olave said on his contract extension talks with the Saints. "I hope we do, so we don't affect the chemistry and stuff going into training camp, but I think it's going to get done soon."

Signing Olave to a long-term deal has been something the Saints have been working on for a while now. While he's dealt with injury issues in the past, Olave is more than worth investing in, as he's a superstar when healthy.

Last season with Shough and a few weeks of Spencer Rattler, Olave caught 100 passes for 1,163 yards and nine touchdowns.

After Shough took over partway through Week 8, Olave caught 56 of 85 targets for 723 yards and six touchdowns. That's a 17-game pace of over 1,300 yards, 11 touchdowns, and 105 receptions.

MORE: 49ers voice frustrations over grueling 2026 travel schedule

Olave is worth a lot of money, and after Drake London just signed a massive $141 million contract over four years, the benchmark for an Olave extension is known.

While he might not reach top-five wide receiver money, his new deal should be at least $30 million per-season, which is well worth it for a true No. 1 WR like Olave.

It's going to be expensive, but with a quarterback on a rookie contract, now is the time to spend a bit on someone like Olave.

Heading into the final year of his rookie contract, the Saints are trying to extend Olave. And based on these comments from Olave, it looks like an extension might get done soon, leading up to Saints training camp this summer.

More NFL news:

Stefon Diggs linked to Rams, Chiefs, Commanders after Patriots release

Harold Fannin Jr. will need to prove his worth in Todd Monken’s Browns offense

Bengals fans should worry about second-year linebackers in 2026

Seahawks’ Nick Emmanwori can be an All-Pro if he plays better in pass coverage

Bears need Luther Burden III and Colston Loveland to step up with DJ Moore traded

Red Sox's Rival Trades For Veteran Starting Pitcher Amid Slew Of Pitching Injuries originally appeared on NESN. Add NESN as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Boston Red Sox are still looking to get on a roll and start playing better baseball, and like them, their division rivals are not giving up despite a slow start.

The Toronto Blue Jays are not playing great right now. They came into the season with lofty expectations. They won the American League last year and spent big in free agency. However, injuries have derailed their season. However, they are still making moves to try to stay afloat while they get healthy.

On Wednesday, they traded for Minnesota Twins pitcher Simeon Woods Richardson. Woods Richardson was designated for assignment on Saturday and the Blue Jays acquired him for cash. Woods Richardson has struggled with consistency, but has pitched in 65 big league games in the last five seasons.

He has made 61 career starts, and could be an option to start games for the Blue Jays. José Berríos and Cody Ponce are out for the year, Dylan Cease and Max Scherzer are on the injured list but rehabbing, and Shane Bieber is still weeks away from returning.

The Blue Jays need arms to eat innings. The Blue Jays are 29-33, but far from out of the race. The American League has been weak, and they are just a couple of games out of a wild card spot. Both the Blue Jays and the Red Sox have time to turn things around. The Blue Jays are making moves to stay afloat while they get healthy, but the Red Sox may need to make moves to upgrade at some spots.

The Blue Jays will be a force when healthy. The Red Sox are getting healthy as well, but their issues have more to do with players underperforming.

More MLB: Red Sox Slugger Finally Snaps 20-Game Home Run Drought

MENOMONIE, UW-Stout senior Payton Dolecki was having an ordinary Thursday when she received an unordinary text from Blue Devils softball coach Lakyn Krizan.

“I was sitting outside with my sisters watching the Women’s College World Series,” Dolecki recalled. “My coach texted me in all caps, ‘You got the Gold Glove,’ and I was like, ‘Shut up. No, I didn’t.’

Dolecki, Stout’s star center fielder, earned a NCAA Division III Rawlings Gold Glove Award courtesy of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association.

“I was freaking out,” Dolecki said.

A senior from Schaumburg, Illinois, Dolecki is the first player in UW-Stout softball history to earn the honor after posting a perfect defensive season, where she recorded 60 putouts and 10 outfield assists without committing an error.

“I didn’t know until I read the article,” Dolecki said of being the first Blue Devil to earn the honor. “I was just like, ‘Wow.’”

Defensive pride exudes from Dolecki whenever she is on the field.

“If my offense wasn’t on, I try to make my defense be the better of the two for that game or that day,” Dolecki said. “I would just try to make it easier for the pitchers so they don’t have to throw more pitches.”

Before getting to Stout, Dolecki learned the diligence needed to succeed at outfield defense while on a youth travel team. She learned not only through hard work, but also through the tutelage of future Northwestern Wildcat Angela Zedak.

“Getting to be under her wing was awesome,” Dolecki said. “Her mentality was like ‘I don’t care, I’m getting everything and going 110% for every single ball.”

That mentality served Dolecki well when she got to Stout, as she recorded just three errors across her four years.

Dolecki’s .989 fielding percentage puts her tied for second in Stout history and her perfect 2026 is the seventh in program history.

Dolecki’s arm was equally as golden as her glove.

She recorded 10 outfield assists, nine of which came on throws to home plate. She saved her best for throwing out the potential game-winning run in the 12th inning against rival UW-Oshkosh and gunning down the tying run in a win against Buena Vista.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen my assistant coach more excited and hyped in his entire life,” Dolecki said of the aftermath of her Buena Vista throw.

Her defense also served Dolecki well at the plate.

“It makes me just feel like I’m contributing to the team,” Dolecki said. “I bring that momentum towards the batter’s box and it makes me feel a lot better and positive about myself knowing I can add on to it.”

Dolecki batted .350 with a .468 slugging percentage to earn All-WIAC Honorable Mention honors this year. She earned First Team All-WIAC as a junior and was an honorable mention as a sophomore.

Dolecki believes her golden honor is indicative of a program on the rise.

“This program is going in such a better direction,” Dolecki said. “Especially with Coach Lak, she’s made us become better people and better players, and made us really work as a family and as one. It’s not just one person’s game, it’s everybody’s game.”