A brief edition today as we take the rest of the week off to recover from the 2018 Tournament of Books. To all who followed along with this year’s ToB: Thank you, and we hope you enjoyed what turned out to be one of our wildest, topsy-turviest years yet. And a special thank-you to our Sustaining Members, who make the Tournament of Books and this newsletter possible. We’ll see you all on Monday!

Equal opportunity tolerates deep inequalities in outcomes. For America to become one, we must reject meritocracy.

Most livestock operations no longer have to report air pollution from their shit. (Literally.)

The brief history of "hair dryer chicken," or, how stupid the media world has become in the Twitter era.

“I’m not mad about this whole ‘cancelled’ thing.” Glover says he doesn’t care about the cancellation of his Deadpool animated series—though just saying that (and by writing an entire script in reference to the incident), it appears evident that he does care. Donald Glover tweets an entire script (here annotated) to refute Marvel saying he was too busy for Deadpool.

The pension funds of labor organizations are the working class's nuclear option.

Video: A Long Island teenager informed on his MS-13 peers to the FBI. Now the US government wants to deport him back to El Salvador, where where he’ll likely be killed.

In the Star Wars movies, TIE fighters make a similar sound, and that’s probably not a mistake. According to the book The Sounds of Star Wars, the Junkers Ju 87 was the inspiration for the TIE fighters’ galactic screech. The ubiquitous “diving plane” sound was designed by Nazis to spread terror during bombing runs.

Maybe you weren’t excited about baseball's Opening Day? Maybe a French home-run call will cheer you up? "BONSOIR!"

Much of what passed for humor in the nineties was just really, really mean. Pop culture in the nineties prized being damaged, dirty, and delinquent. The look didn’t age well.