{"id":59285,"date":"2026-05-09T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T13:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=59285"},"modified":"2026-05-09T01:48:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T08:48:02","slug":"open-thread-may-9-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/05\/09\/open-thread-may-9-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread May 9 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was David Attenborough&#8217;s 100th birthday. The first email I saw about it had the subject line &#8220;100 years of David Attenborough&#8221; which made me think we had lost him &#8211; but, thankfully, we have not. He is so well known and loved. Some years ago I went to a college theater production featuring the three winners of a contest for one-act plays. The one I remember best had three actors &#8211; two were visible and were a boy and a girl mayfly. The third, invisible inside a prop TV set was David Attenborough narratibg a program about the life cycle of Mayflies, which you probably know is in the neighborhood of 24 hours. The two Mayfly characters were getting increasingly panicked that they wouldn&#8217;t have time to reproduce. It was very funny. (The second was about Philip Glass tring to place a bakery order in the style of his music. That was funny too, but not as funny as the Mayflies. I don&#8217;t remember the third at all.)<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"https:\/\/criticalread.substack.com\/p\/journalists-who-write-about-trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Press Watch<\/a>. Suggestions to more wimpy news media about how to report on the Evil Emperor<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"https:\/\/wolvesandsheep.substack.com\/p\/special-report-the-consequences-of\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bowers News Media<\/a>. Yes, the voters in Virginia overwhelmingly voted for a [temporary) distrct map skewed Democratic &#8211; and the Virginia Supreme Court immediatelu struck it down. Bowers News Media is big on sharing things ordinary people can do &#8211; some are always not feasible, geographically or physically or budget-wise.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/kids-tear-gas-trump-immigration-crackdown\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/kids-tear-gas-trump-immigration-crackdown<\/a><br \/>\nFrom ProPublica. The war and some other things have kind of pushed this out of the news. It&#8217;s not all video &#8211; there are just three to scroll down past in order to get to content.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2FmZW3KR3MY?si=lzq4X2eJyv80_jEx\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JM1wAyvFVwk?si=X7NweKdHO5dOscfI\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-59288\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/shells.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"643\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/shells.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/shells-300x241.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/shells-150x121.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/shells-768x617.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was David Attenborough&#8217;s 100th birthday. The first email I saw about it had the subject line &#8220;100 years of David Attenborough&#8221; which made me think we had lost him &#8211; but, thankfully, we have not. He is so well known and loved. Some years ago I went to a college theater production featuring the <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/05\/09\/open-thread-may-9-2026\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,4467,7378,4531,3781,5458,7376,7318,4748,3811,7358,7377,4657],"class_list":["post-59285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-children","tag-david-attenborough","tag-dogs","tag-elections","tag-fafo","tag-geese","tag-ice-bp","tag-media","tag-personal","tag-seashells","tag-tear-gas","tag-virginia","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}