In this week's newsletter @salazar.bsky.social examines Inter Miami's White House visit, which wasn't really about Messi or Trump. Instead, it was about the team's billionaire owner Jorge Mas—and his family's decadeslong push for regime change in Cuba goldengoalmag.substack.com/p/theres-mor...
Why was Messi really at the White House? For this week's @goldengoalmag.bsky.social newsletter, I wrote about Trump, Cuba, Inter Miami president Jorge Mas and the legacy of his father, Jorge Mas Canosa, the godfather of Cuban American politicians. goldengoalmag.substack.com/p/theres-mor...
Went on @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social and Daniel Alarcón's indispensable and fun new World Cup podcast with @salazar.bsky.social to talk about @goldengoalmag.bsky.social and why we're still excited about the 2026 World Cup in spite of, you know, everything open.spotify.com/episode/0kaB...
For the @goldengoalmag.bsky.social newsletter I wrote about the 1998 World Cup game between Iran and the United States and the upcoming tournament goldengoalmag.substack.com/p/the-mother...
Give the good people at @goldengoalmag.bsky.social all your money: www.kickstarter.com/projects/mag...
"Golden Goal is a magazine about understanding and untangling this messy, chaotic jumble at the heart of the World Cup, with an internationalist vision that doesn’t shy away from the sport’s growing corruption but also resists cynicism and myopia." open.substack.com/pub/goldengo...
"The World Cup is now less than four months away. Has that sentence ever felt more deflating?"
We'll be sending out a newsletter every Friday through the end of the World Cup! Read the first installment and sign up here
Infantino got you down? Not sure how to feel about this year's World Cup? Want to read writers from around the world make sense of it all? Follow us: @goldengoalmag.bsky.social
Infantino got you down? Not sure how to feel about this year's World Cup? Want to read writers from around the world make sense of it all? Follow us: @goldengoalmag.bsky.social
@realgdt.bsky.social I know it still feels far away but I'm curious, with the World Cup happening later this year, what's your favorite World Cup memory?
fwiw it’s been about six weeks since Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of trafficking drugs into the US
So for months they have tried to blame the entire fentanyl crisis on Venezuela and the indictment only mentions cocaine, which they pardoned a different guy for weeks ago
A few months ago @thelocal.to got a promising pitch from a writer with bylines in whole bunch of reputable publications—The Cut, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, etc. Then I started investigating. Here's a story about fabulists in journalism's AI slop era. thelocal.to/investigatin...
One way of thinking about Twitter, especially in the Elon Musk era, is as the latest and most sophisticated version of the mailing lists that have powered the conservative movement, and the various scams and cons and schemes that constitute it, since the 1960s--in other words, as a huge and immediately accessible collection of suckers, waiting to have their avidity and paranoia exploited for cash. The predictions markets here are happy to play the same role with heavy X.com users as crypto scams and meme-stock hustlers did on the same site a few years ago, or as cash-for-gold ads did with Fox News viewers a decade before that, or as direct-mail get-rich-quick schemes did with Goldwater voters deep in prehistory.1 But the demand for dumb money created by the increasing annexation of our everyday social and cultural lives into casino-market hybrids like predictions markets (or, arguably, social media itself2) isn’t going to be satisfied solely by a pre-existing population of Birchite suckers. We talk a lot about the “male loneliness crisis” but in my estimation we don’t talk enough about the “male suckerfication crisis”: The process by which young men are continuously cultivated--by politicians, influencers, podcasters, sportscasters, and the very structure of social networks--as dupes and suckers, both for the enrichment and empowerment of Trumpist politicians and movements but also in service of the profits an ever-expanding roster of gambling and gambling-adjacent industries, among them app-enabled retail day-trading, crypto speculation, predictions markets, and of course, actual sports betting.
we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...
The Oregon Republican Party tried to help Donald Trump make the case for military intervention in Portland with an image of a fiery protest — but since Portland is calm, they had to fabricate one by merging old photos of police in Ecuador and protesters in Brazil www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.
Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.
Quick reminder: most of ICE is deemed “essential” during a shutdown, but of course ICE agents (like most other essential gov employees) are working without pay right now and hoping Congress will eventually fill in back pay. www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/what-go...
Whatever country you are from, the officially approved way to avoid getting grabbed off the street is to have pale enough skin. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...
Statement from @postguild.bsky.social on the firing of Karen Attiah:
America is one of those countries where if you host a global sporting event, inclusive messages have to be censored to so as not to anger the central government. In this case the message is “racism is bad” www.nytimes.com/athletic/643...
Every evening, without fail, Pope Francis speaks with priests and parishioners at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City. He tells them that they are not forgotten and that, as long as he has a voice to cry out for an end to the Israeli assault on Gaza, there is hope for peace and justice.
Again, the chart below is circa 2023, but Francis has had the College of Cardinals (who vote for the next pope) stacked with his own choices for roughly a year and a half.
sad to lose a pope that prayed for Palestine every day
Trump's counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka says Americans critical of deportations like Abrego Garcia's are providing "material support" to terrorists — a felony crime.
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-cou...
One man in CECOT "doesn’t even know that his child’s been born," his lawyer said. Another has muscular dystrophy affecting his right arm, per a court filing. The facts fit "every definition of an enforced disappearance under international law," an attorney told me.
www.huffpost.com/entry/cecot-...
hmm
As hundreds of demonstrators made their way through Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, the White House defended the arrest and rebuked the school for what it called lack of cooperation.
= CNN Politics Subscribe 58 min ago Colombia sending planes to pick up migrants in US after scrapped military flights, officials say From CNN's Priscilla Alvarez and Stefano Pozzebon Colombia is sending two government planes to pick up migrants who were originally scheduled to go on military flights, according to a Trump administration official and a Colombian official. It comes after a major clash between the United States and Colombia over a pair of military flights carrying migrants that were abruptly rejected over the weekend — bringing the countries on the brink of a trade war. After a tense feud that unfolded publicly, the White House said late Sunday that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights — both on civilian and military aircraft — and that the tariffs would be held off pending implementation of the deal.
Colombia’s president demanded deportees be treated with dignity rather than shackled on the floor of a military transport. Though widely reported as a concession to Trump, it appears he got the resolution he wanted for now. www.cnn.com/politics/liv...
Tens of thousands of people have vanished in northern Mexico, many because of cartel violence. A specialized research institute — the first of its kind in the country — is taking on an almost impossible task: Finding their remains and sending them back home. nyti.ms/4aczzQw
I’m sorry but this is the case for every one of us lol. at a certain point we all lend varying levels of legitimacy to the entities and people we consult to make up our minds
