Newsletter Leaf Journal XXXVIII 〜 Laundry cycling
Newsletter Leaf Journal 238 includes links to our six new cycling and laundry-adjacent NLJ articles (as well as several ECS posts), 21 links from around the web (with commentary), and other news and notes.
Welcome to the 237th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social. This newsletter comes to you as always from the administrator, editor, and writer of both publications, Nicholas A. Ferrell.
I had my busiest week in terms of new articles in some time -- thanks in no small part to my drafting most of the articles ahead of time (TBD on whether I will be able to repeat the feat). We had a distinct trend in the new articles which you will be able to read about below.
Leaves from the week that was
I published six new New Leaf Journal articles since mailing Newsletter 237. The content of these articles explains this newsletter's title.
I published two articles about climbing times at the ongoing Tour de France, which I am following from afar this year. In Pogačar Chases Riis on Hautacam, I wrote about the likely winner of the Tour de France tomorrow (today being Saturday, July 26), Tadej Pogačar, nearly breaking Bjarne Riis' famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) ascent record on Hautacam in the 1996 Tour de France. Inspired by the success of that article (more on that later), I wrote Ventoux Too: Pogačar’s New TDF Climbing Record, covering Mr. Pogačar (along with three other riders) breaking the fastest ascent record on Mont Ventoux in stage 16 of the Tour.
My other four new New Leaf Journal articles all dealt with laundry. In Overheard: I am THE MAT, I speculated why a man yelled "I am THE MAT" while walking in Brooklyn Heights. I then moved to more direct laundry coverage with Happy Cleaners Cargo Trike in Gowanus, which serves as a spiritual follow-up to my popular (relatively) article about Amazon e-cargo bikes (more on that later too). In Window Washing Machine Couple in Ridgewood, I posted my fifth article drawn from things that happened on May 26, 2024, when I took a short 22.6 mile walk. Finally, I discussed in detail my first Linux computer in The Death of Windows XP and My First Linux Netbook.
Things were also busy on The Emu Café Social. Two posts were related to my spontaneous Tour de France coverage. In Old Tour de France Stage Profiles I complained about not being able to find the 1994 and 1996 Hautacam stage profiles from the Tour for my corresponding New Leaf Journal article. A few days later, I wrote about how the two top riders in the 2025 Tour did not threaten Jan Ullrich's record from his stunning attack on Col de la Madeleine in stage 16 of the 1998 Tour de France. Sticking with the sport's theme, I wrote about Manny Pacquiao's Reasonably Successful Comeback to the boxing ring at age 46. In two miscellaneous posts, I offered a quip about the 2025 New York City mayoral election, my take on Southwest Airline's new seating policy, and how a press release about a video game reminded me to start an anime airing this season.
Leaves from around the web
You may not have time for links around the web this week if you enjoy my cycling- and laundry-themed articles. But on the off chance you are a fast and voracious reader, I present 21 links from around the world wide web (the links are almost as good as my link commentary).
Let's check in on apps
Popular app Tea lets women anonymously review men
Matty Merritt for Morning Brew. July 26, 2025.
Oh lovely, an app for gossiping about men. It sounds like Reddit but "Tea vets users by asking them to upload a selfie and a photo of their ID." Now what could go wrong?
DATA BREACH ALERT: Edelson Lechtzin LLP is Investigating Claims on Behalf of Tea Dating Advice, Inc. (Tea app), Customers Whose Data May Have Been Compromised
Edelson Lechtzin LLP (via PR Newswire). July 25, 2025.
So people download random gossip apps and then submit their ID so they can gossip on the app? What a world man. "Edelson Lechtzin LLP is investigating a class action lawsuit to seek legal remedies for individuals whose sensitive personal data may have been compromised by the Tea data breach." (No luck for the people whose sensitive data was disseminated by the hack victims.)
Come again?
Echelon kills smart home gym equipment offline capabilities with update
Scharon Harding for Ars Technica. July 25, 2025.
This story gives me a headache.
Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster
Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman for After Babel. July 24, 2025.
I largely agreed with the essay until the middle where it seems to suggest that placing prop bets with your kids on your phone is something that could be condoned, if not encouraged.
The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters
Derek Thompson. July 9, 2025.
This is a good essay up until the last paragraph. The last paragraph is why he doesn't get invited to parties.
China wants to invade Siberia, not Taiwan
John Lonergan for The Hill. July 2, 2025.
"Siberia offers a tantalizing prize with fewer immediate risks [than invading Taiwan]." There are many problems in this essay but I was most impressed with how he glossed over the potential risks that may flow from invading a country with thousands of nuclear weapons and posing what it may understand to be a genuine existential threat (as opposed to things it pretends are existential threats).
Let's check in on AI
"At Times, Filings by Pro Se Litigants and Attorneys Alike Are Wholly Nonsensical, but Pointing That Out" Doesn't Justify Recusal
Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy. July 18, 2025.
My Mom suggested to me that AI will undoubtedly buttress many nonsensical pro se court filings with case law that would be on point but for the fact that it does not exist.
Hallucinations in the District of New Jersey
Josh Blackman for The Volokh Conspiracy. July 24, 2025.
Language models are not truth models: U.S. District Court Judge edition.
Reversing Previous Restrictions, Washington Allows NVIDIA To Sell Advanced Chips to China
Jack Burnham and Miles Kershner for FDD. July 16, 2025.
Bad policy but the Chinese legal system will be hardest hit.
Ancient bugs (or non bugs that are like bugs)
The Inhabitants of an Iron Age Settlement in Western Spain Burned Their Houses to Rebuild Them: Ritual or Renovation?
Guillermo Carvajal for LBV. July 15, 2025.
My guess is that they saw a roach and burned down their houses. I should turn this into a Justin and Justina dialogue. You heard it here first.
A Trilobite Fossil Used as an Amulet in Roman Hispania: The First of Its Kind in the Classical World
Guillermo Carvajal for LBV. July 21, 2025.
"A team of Spanish researchers has made an extraordinary discovery at the Roman site of A Cibdá de Armea, near Ourense (Galicia, Spain): a trilobite fossil, a marine animal extinct for millions of years, that was modified and likely used as an amulet or piece of jewelry between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. It is the first trilobite ever found in a Roman archaeological context, and only the eleventh discovered at archaeological sites worldwide associated with ancient cultures."
Feel good stories about saving children
Heroic Chicago man saves 7-month-old girl abandoned after car-jacking
Natalie O'Neill for New York Post. July 10, 2025.
Clutch play by Mr. Earl Abernathy.
Iowa boy born at 21 weeks is now the world's most premature baby
Taylor Vessel for Iowa Health Care. July 23, 2025.
Certainly not a record that any expecting parents are aiming for, but an extraordinary record under the circumstances.
Curating headlines is an artform
“I should not have gone out naked” admits man arrested at shrine in Japan
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. July 5, 2025.
Recognition is step one.
The Grammarphobia Blog: Unpacking ‘emotional baggage’
Grammarphobia. July 7, 2025.
You expect the headline heat from Grammarphobia.
Vending machine Saturday
Ozempic Is Quietly Disrupting Snack Sales — What Vending Operators Need to Know
Vending Connection. June 23, 2025.
I doubt the Ozempic users are quiet about it.
Unusual vending machine in Akihabara sells drinks you won’t find anywhere else in Tokyo
Oona McGee for SoraNews24. May 6, 2025.
I reviewed the article and confirmed that I would not find the drinks in Brooklyn (some look good so that makes me sad).
Late 1990s and early 2000s NBA basketball
Q&A With Jeff Pearlman on Three-Ring Circus, Kobe, Shaq, and More
Harlan Schreiber for Hoops Analyst. September 25, 2020.
A look back at the dysfunctional, but ultimately successful, Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant led Lakers teams of the late 90s and early 2000s.
Allen Iverson: The Question is Answered, 1999
Bob Kusa at From Way Downtown. April 15, 2025; re-printing article by John Smallwood for Fastbreak Magazine (1999).
“Then it took winning for people to just try to accept me, try to understand me, listen to what I had to say, instead of just judging me by what they heard on television or read in the newspaper. It took winning for people to start to open their eyes and look at me. But that’s life, and I accept that.”
Summer League Stats You Can Trust
Owen Phillips at The F5. July 18, 2025.
Good article but as someone who was following the NBA in the 2000s I'm very disappointed to not see any references to one of the all time greats of summer league, the 5th overall pick of the 2002 NBA Draft himself, Nikoloz Tskitishvili.
What have you accomplished?
These Australian Cockatoos Learned to Operate Drinking Fountains With Their Feet to Quench Their Thirst
Sara Hashemi for Smithsonian Magazine. June 4, 2025.
Celebrating the cockatoos learning bad manners.
Most-turned leaves of the Newsletter Week
I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2022 review) to track page hits. In each issue of the newsletter, I list our five most-visited articles, according to Koko Analytics, for the one-week period beginning with Saturday and ending with Friday. Below, you will find the most-visited articles of 2025 Newsletter Week XXXI (July 19-25) along with their 2025 and historic (going back 2021) weekly ranking statistics.
-
Pogačar Chases Riis on Hautacam
N.A. Ferrell. July 20, 2025.
2025: 1 appearance and 1 top placement. -
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
2025: 5 appearances and 1 top placement. -
Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
2025: 13 appearances and 6 top placements. -
Cycling Doping Fallacies
Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 5, 2024.
2025: 1 appearance.
Cumulative: 6 appearances and 3 top placements. -
Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow
Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023.
2025: 7 appearances.
Cumulative: 9 appearances.
Analysis
It was all bikes (loosely defined in one case) and Pokémon in this week's ranking.
My article on Tadej Pogačar's assault on Hautacam had the best single week of any article of 2025 (Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships had one week in February in the same ballpark). It most have been posted on a forum or something to that effect (I know it appeared as a pingback on an article I cited), but I did not track down the exact source of its traffic. Coming in fourth in Pogačar's slipstream was my 2024 article on Cycling Doping Fallacies, which appeared in the first five Newsletter rankings of 2024 (thanks to The Browser newsletter and Hacker News) before retiring from having any presence in the weekly or monthly charts (it was our most-visited article of 2024 thanks to its January performance, however).
Spots 2-3 and 5 featured more regular ranking favorites. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search was well on its way to seizing the top ranking for July before Mr. Pogačar's late attack (it is still possible, but it would need a big final week), and I expect it to notch a few first-place rankings in the coming weeks. Speaking of the coming weeks, I would be surprised if any of the cycling articles take another top placement, but it would not be too surprising to see one or both of my two pieces on the 2025 Tour in next week's top five (I would however be surprised if we saw them feature over the longer term in 2025).
We have now had 12 articles lead at least one weekly ranking in the first 31 weeks of 2025. The record is 14, which was set in both 2023 and 2024. We seem to be well on our way to breaking that mark.
Taking leaf
Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed this issue and have not done so already, you can follow this newsletter by signing up for our weekly email, adding our RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or checking in on our archive page.
We had a busy week of articles. While I do not expect to have quite the same output this upcoming week, I look forward to sharing at least a few interesting new posts with you next Saturday on August 2, 2025.