April 15, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE WALT DISNEY CO. BEGINS LAYING OFF 1,000 EMPLOYEES:

The Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday began layoffs expected to lead to 1,000 job cuts across the company.

Josh D’Amaro, who in February succeeded Bob Iger as chief executive, announced broader layoffs following a move in January to consolidate Disney’s marketing division. The cuts are expected to fall across the Burbank, California-based company’s traditional television businesses, including ESPN, as well as its movie studio. Employees in product and technology, and in certain corporate functions will also be affected.

Let’s check in with the news and opinion division of Disney:

UPDATE: Link in headline was missing before; now added.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRAY LADY DIVES FOR FAINTING COUCH (AGAIN): NYT Melts Down Over Texas Rangers Statue Outside… Texas Rangers’ Stadium.

The New York Times and its sports section, The Athletic, has found its newest outrage target: a statue of a Texas Ranger outside Globe Life Field, home of the Texas Rangers. Seriously.

That was the basis for Sam Blum’s 2,000-plus-word Wednesday piece about the Rangers installing the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at the ballpark. Fellow Athletic writer Stephen J. Nesbitt piled on by calling it a “deeply controversial” statue and capping off his post with the always-serious journalistic flourish: “Yikes.”

He also called Blum’s article “important work.” Yes, we need more sports journalists doing deep dives on… statues outside stadiums. These guys are really putting those journalism degrees to work.

OutKick founder Clay Travis responded the way plenty of normal sports fans probably did.

“It’s a statue of a Texas Ranger at a Texas Rangers stadium,” Travis wrote on X, blasting The Athletic for treating the whole thing like Pulitzer Prize-worthy reporting.

Hard to improve on that, but I’ll try.

Exit quote: “Keep in mind: the statue came down during the ‘Summer of Love’ when Black Lives Matter activists were burning American cities to the ground and basically demanding that all American history be erased. The statue removal from Dallas Love Field came at a time that practically any statue that depicted a white person was at risk of being removed, defaced or destroyed. The Athletic tries to make a point that the statue being taken out of the airport is a signal it shouldn’t exist anywhere, publicly. But that ignores the broader context of 2020.”

Of course it does — because the left’s worldview is permanently trapped in that annus horribilis, and they can’t figure out how the rest of us were never trapped in that box canyon.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, THEY’RE NOT WRONG:

Posted at 9:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GAY TALESE ON A WRITER’S LIFE:

An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New York kept Talese in his Upper East Side townhouse, where he first occupied a bachelor pad as a New York Times reporter at 26 and then bought the whole property with his wife, Nan, by 1973, when he was a writer – and subject – at Esquire. On a January late afternoon, when the call arrived, Talese was pushing 95, and I was in Pennsylvania, laid up on crutches and recovering from a knee injury. There was no time for a serendipiter’s journey.

“When I was younger and working in the field, I always felt you have to be there in person,” said Talese, who in 1999, following a post-anniversary European sojourn with Nan, and in a fit of inspiration and determination, suspended his plans to return home and instead flew to China to pursue a story about the soccer player whose kick cost her team the World Cup. He didn’t return to New York for five months. “You observe so much in person that you don’t get over the phone,” said Talese. “But that’s what the limitations are like today. I can’t meet you. I’m 94, and I can’t go outside. It’s snowing outside.”

In his writing life, Talese has accumulated untold flyer miles, sources, and carefully cut shirt boards – his preference for notetaking, as the son of a Calabrese tailor. There was never a smartphone or recorder, nor even email, until The New Yorker requested that he start submitting his stories online. Today, “people have a narcissistic relationship with their phone,” said Talese. “I never had a phone.”

Indeed, Talese is among the last writers to have lived a life free of pixels, texts, and scrolls. Instead, he pursued his subjects, either befriending them or observing them if they were averse, and then wrote about them with detachment, fairness, and meticulous care. Stories germinated from chance encounters, late-night dinner conversations, and periods of waiting. Drafts and rewrites were composed on yellow legal pads and the typewriter.

It was how Talese could produce his most famous profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 60 years ago this month in Esquire, and write how “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed,” at 28 for the magazine. “The problem in New York today: most people don’t see anything. They’re looking down in their fucking phones,” said Talese. “They’re walking the streets and everybody’s looking down, not up. I was always looking up … wondering what goes on up there.” But now the influencers abound. “No one gives a shit about what’s going on anywhere except in their fucking phone.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WOW, IT REALLY IS THE GAYS OF HORMUZ:

Note that breakthroughs in miniaturization will eventually allow the Iranians an even smaller one-man version of that sub:

Classical reference in headline:

Posted at 8:33 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP: California Giving Homeless Illegal Aliens Sex Change Operations.

I would call this peak woke, but we will never reach peak woke because they will keep inventing new categories of victims to steal money and rights from you to give them. As with the ever-expanding number of letters in the Progress Pride list, the types of victims to be unearthed is endless.

But this certainly is a new level: creating a program to give free sex change surgeries to transgender homeless illegal aliens. One hopes that they are, as seems likely, “of color” to add yet another category of oppressed people. Throw in “indigenous,” or perhaps terrorist drug-dealing gang members, and liberals will have an orgasm.

The invaluable Christopher Rufo uncovered the story by doing actual journalism, something that barely exists anymore outside the alternative media. It wasn’t exactly hard to uncover because, as is almost always the case, most of the people involved aren’t exactly hiding what they are doing. It’s just that the Pravda Media is incurious about anything that might make lefties look bad to normal people.

Flashback to October of 2024: The Democrats’ Insanity Defense. “The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. ‘When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.’ Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. ‘Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.’”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE HAS MAGICAL POWERS: Sydney Sweeney has the last laugh in second American Eagle ad campaign.

Well, it’s mostly just one magical power: Not caring. And why should she? “Despite the controversy, the campaign was the brand’s most successful to date.”

That’s because the “controversy” is a few losers yammering on social media. It’s 2026, nobody much cares.

Related:

Flashback:

Posted at 6:59 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE SINGLE SWALWELL THEORY: The Mystery Sweeping D.C.: Who Executed the Political Hitjob That Destroyed Eric Swalwell?

For all [Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries] know, Swalwell will be replaced with an AOC/Mamdani-styled “Democrat Socialist” that’ll cause them headaches. Keeping a reliable, dependable, known quantity like Swalwell under lock-and-key would’ve made their jobs a helluva lot easier.

Yes, the Democratic Machine had a vested interest in pushing Swalwell out of the governor’s race — but it wasn’t in their interest to push him out of Congress completely!

Second, the catalyst for the hit job doesn’t appear to be Swalwell’s career in D.C. Instead, it’s all seemingly connected to his Sacramento aspirations. That would point to a California-based culprit.

Which is why I think it’s more likely Pelosi and Jeffries covered up Swalwell’s crimes than outed them.

And third, if Swalwell’s skirt-chasing, philandering, and/or sexual deviancies were an open secret among Democrats, media, and staffers, then anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of PR could’ve executed the hit. This wasn’t the kind of high-level sandbagging that could’ve only come from a powerful political machine.

Honestly? Hits like this aren’t rocket science. Any Dem candidate could’ve done it.

Including billionaire Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, who’s spent $120 million of his own money on his primary campaign. Steyer was already one of the top two or three polling Democrats; eliminating Swalwell was exactly what he needed to claim the big prize.

With a $50K private investigator and a semi-decent PR professional on staff, Steyer could’ve executed the hit himself.

Same goes for candidates Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, Antonio Villaraigosa, Xavier Becerra, Betty Yee, and Tony Thurmond. Mahan’s raised over $11 million; Porter nearly $6 million; Becerra and Villaraigosa, over $3 million (each).

PIs and PR are cheap. Emailing/texting a reporter is free. It’s well within the budget of all the aforementioned candidates.

Furthermore, if Swalwell’s libido was as manic as we’re (now) hearing, it’s not like the PIs would’ve had to dig too hard. Discovering that Swalwell was a loathsome, disgusting pig was low-hanging fruit.

But with a reliable, dependable California Democrat in an ultra-safe congressional district, no one in his party — and thus, none of the DNC’s coconspirators in the mainstream media — had a motive to assassinate Swalwell’s character. Killing his career didn’t benefit any of the kingmakers on the radical left.

Until he ran for governor.

Related:

Posted at 6:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:

Posted at 6:25 pm by Stephen Green

I TOO ENDORSE REGIME CHANGE IN BRUSSELS:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT:

Posted at 5:54 pm by Stephen Green

HE’D BE A FOOL TO GO ALONG AT THIS LATE DATE:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Glenn Reynolds

REQUIRED READING:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green