Leafy Intro

Welcome to the 285th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal ("NLJ") and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social ("ECS"). This newsletter comes to you as always from the administrator, editor, and writer of both publications, Nicholas A. Ferrell.

Unfortunately, I was not able to publish much last week due to (1) work assignments and (2) working on a couple of projects that are not yet ready for publication. But I nevertheless have a few new articles and short posts to share to go with our usual collection of links from around the web and other news and notes.

Leaves from the week that was

I published two new NLJ articles since mailing Newsletter 284.

First, I published From Missing the Playoffs to the NBA Finals. While the week's sports news was dominated by the New York Knicks ending their 53-year championship drought (see my related article from 2025), this article was inspired by the 2025-26 runner-up San Antonio Spurs. I collected some interesting information about every instance in NBA history wherein a team went from missing the playoffs one season to making the NBA Finals the next. Should Spurs fans be optimistic for 2026-27? I present some cause for optimism and trepidation.

In a second and final NLJ article of the week was On Complaining About AI in Pinterest on Reddit. I read a couple of articles about people complaining about AI on Pinterest. A quote from one article discussed people complaining about Pinterest AI on Reddit. In my essay, I question whether Reddit, an AI-ridden social media platform, is the best place to complain about other social media platforms, before segueing into offering solutions (as they are).

I also published a few new short-form posts and articles on ECS. You will find new daily links posts for June 15, 16, and 18 (not "daily" last week, alas).

Continuing with my link-sharing project for June, I published AI Slop About Medieval London, How I’ll Take My Coffee, The Case Against Share Buttons, and Ambient Irony on Amodei vs Altman. All of those posts focus on sharing blog posts and articles from around the web -- with additional thoughts and commentary from yours truly -- so consider each as two posts/articles for the (free) price of one.

Links from around the web

Big readers of the sort who read The Newsletter Leaf Journal may need more to read than what I was able to publish last week. But fear not, I present 17 links from around the web with lengthy quotes and my world-renowned organizing and commentary.

Fiery enthusiasm

1. Mamdani's New York City Had a Riot and Barely Anyone Noticed (Ira Stoll for The Washington Free Beacon. June 16, 2026.)

"The New York Post, usually on high alert for signs of deterioration, kept what a headline called 'anarchy in the big apple' off the tabloid front page. A Post editorial advised, 'let’s all just bask in the euphoria,' claiming "the whole town erupted in joy." Said the editorial, 'Yes, some of it got out of hand...'"

As an RSS subscriber to the New York Post's Metro section, I too noticed that New York's preeminent tabloid was oddly disinterested in the burning buses in Manhattan. Surely they would present a compelling explanation...

2. Knicks fan braved 12-hour flight delays, psychotic Spurs fans -- but it was worth it to see NY win it all (Alex Mitchell for the New York Post. June 17, 2026.)

"I saw a lunatic in a white pickup truck laugh and point a gun at two Knicks fans minding their own business waiting to cross a street — and other New Yorkers told me they got egged like Victor Wembanyama during the finals while in Manhattan, among more stupidity over a damn game."

Or, alternatively, the New York Post will ignore the reasonable questions about its coverage of events in New York City and do whatever this is.

Less fiery NBA Finals-related news

3. The Knicks Are the Perfect Champ For the NBA's Weirdest Era (Neil Paine. June 14, 2026.)

"And so, as much as any team, the Knicks fully represent the NBA’s unprecedented Parity Era — as they sealed the league’s eighth different champion in the past eight seasons..."

I had included two past articles by Mr. Paine about parity in the NBA in last weeks NBA Finals droughts article.

4. Episode 58. The New York Knicks Logo Design. (Gameplan Creative and Brigitte Smith at The Authentic Voice of Sports Branding. June 19, 2026.)

"Rather than keep the [Knicks logo re-design] project entirely in-house, I chose to collaborate with designer and illustrator Michael Doret, whose lettering carried both strength and unmistakable New York character."

The 90s produced eye-catching NBA logos. The 2010s and 20s produced the sterile Brooklyn Nets.

Recipes

5. The Cookbook That Became a Legend (Esther Levy Chehebar for Tablet Magazine. December 3, 2025.)

"In the pantheon of cookbooks to have come out of the Syrian Jewish community (and there are many), one reigns supreme. It isn’t elegant or sleek and has no high-quality photographs to accompany its recipes. In fact, it’s completely void of color, save for its cover, a banal red jacket stamped with an unassuming title: Deal Delights: Cook book presented by Sisterhood of Deal Synagogue."

Apparently hard to come by these days.

6. I Bought a Vintage Dress With Recipes Printed on It. Then I Tried Them (Heather Martin for Today. April 27, 2026.)

"'Models Coat was originally designed by the Swirl label,' Cleaver explains of the fashion house that manufactured casual dresses and loungewear starting in the 1940s, including this wearable cookbook. 'They were worn by models between fittings, like a robe, easy to get on and off. They also protected high-end designer clothing from things like makeup and spills.'"

Fortunately the recipes on the dress sound acceptable.

Problem and solution

7. Harvard Students Are Twice as Mentally Ill as the General Population Amid Ivy Psychological Meltdown (Ira Stoll for The Washington Free Beacon. June 16, 2026.)

"Potential causes of the trends are multifarious. As with mild autism and learning disabilities of the sort that generate eligibility for untimed standardized tests, it’s unclear how much of the increase is in incidence and how much is in identification—that is, are today’s students really more depressed, anxious, or panicked than previous generations, or are they and the grownups around them simply more likely to diagnose and label their maladies as mental illness?"

I remember a decent number of my high school classmates suddenly had hitherto unnoted learning disabilities (mind my school had a specific LD program that these classmates were not a part of) when it came time for extra time on standardized tests. Over-diagnosis and self-identification is a problem. But if we can't fix that...

8. Looking for an ADHD coach? Choose carefully (Katherine Ellison for Knowable Magazine. February 18, 2026.)

"After completion of the course, as Sanders exchanged online messages with Otsuka, the coach startled her with a suggestion: Perhaps she’d like to be a coach herself?"

You can turn it into a career path. Or...

9. Exploring the Dangers of AI in Mental Health Care (Sarah Wells for HAI. June 11, 2026.)

"Low-cost and accessible AI therapy chatbots powered by large language models have been touted as one way to meet the need."

Say no more. Read no more. Help is on the way, Ivy League students.

Problem & solution II

10. How Do You Lift a 30,000-Pound Mast From a Warship Built a Record-Breaking 261 Years Ago? With a Really, Really Big Crane (Ellen Wexler for Smithsonian Magazine. May 1, 2026.)

"After months of planning, workers arrived at the dockyard ready to carry out their mission: removing the foremast from HMS Victory, the world’s oldest warship still in commission. They needed to ensure that the mast—which weighs more than 30,000 pounds—wouldn’t damage the 261-year-old vessel."

NLJ knows who to call. But what about...

11. How Much of a Role Did Steroids Play in the Steroid Era? (Ben Lindbergh for The Ringer. September 28, 2018.)

"Th[e] summer [of 2018] has been ripe for retrospectives about the 1998 home run race, most of which have attempted to reconcile how fans felt about it then with how fans feel about it now. Most of those pieces have taken two things for granted: First, that the 1998 home run race helped save baseball by bringing fans back to ballparks in the wake of the 1994 work stoppage; and second, that the home run race was largely steroid-fueled. But neither assertion is as certain as it sounds."

An interesting and thoughtful piece, but it was definitely "largely steroid-fueled" (and I would be careful about assuming that the steroids go away).

The secrets of mathematics

12. A New Train Station in Cambridge Has Sparked Controversy Among Mathematicians (Megan Schires for Arch Daily. June 3, 2017.)

"A new train station in Cambridge is getting a lot of attention from a surprising audience: mathematicians. Cambridge North Station is clad in aluminum panels with a geometrical cutout design. The architecture firm, Atkins, originally claimed that the pattern was derived from Cambridge alumnus John Conway’s 'Game of Life,' but eagle-eyed mathematicians soon realized that was incorrect."

Key among them was Stephen Wolfram.

13. Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics (Brennan Kenneth Brown. April 29, 2026.)

"Video games are, surprisingly, a good vehicle for encountering mathematics and computer science."

I came expecting Donkey Kong Jr Math. Instead I found links to interesting videos about how Animal Crossing villagers read letters and classic Pokémon glitches.

Surveying the domains

14. Domains as "Internet Handles" (マリウス. December 12, 2025.)

"[D]omains introduce significant drawbacks that usernames do not suffer from: Greater scarcity and reduced availability, centralized infrastructure vulnerabilities and governance risks, reduced privacy and increased traceability, and recurring financial burdens for users."

There are benefits to domains as handles, but as the article aptly notes -- there are also drawbacks.

15. 21,864 Yugoslavian .yu Domains (Jacob Filipp. March 22, 2026.)

"In 2010 the entire domain space of Yugoslavia (.yu) was taken off the internet. After all, the country didn’t exist anymore."

The .yu ccTLD died in 2010, but the .su ccTLD lives.

Outer-space, imagined and real

16. Alpha Centauri (Jimmy at The Digital Antiquarian. June 20, 2025.)

"The idea for Alpha Centauri had been batted around intermittently as a possible 'sequel to Civilization' ever since Sid Meier had made one of the two possible victory conditions of that game the dispatching of a spaceship to that distant star, an achievement what was taken as a proof that the nation so doing had reached the absolute pinnacle of terrestrial achievement."

I was interested in playing Alpha Centuari back in high school. For whatever it is worth this retro review is not inspiring me to take up the project. With that being said, this article has plenty of interesting Sid Meier history.

17. Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso (Maciej Cegłowski. May 6, 2026.)

"After two years, four prototypes, and a great deal of paperwork, Lavazza and the Italian space agency sent a proper espresso machine to the ISS in 2015. On Earth, a basic Lavazza espresso maker costs about $150 and weighs 3.5 kilograms. The coffee machine’s spaceborne cousin was a 20kg box about the size of an oven. The cost to build it was not disclosed, but was likely in the single-digit millions."

Sounds a bit trickier than Illy's espresso-maker vending machine.

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2025 article) to track page visits. 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 our most-visited articles for the week of June 13-19 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (NAF. Jan. 20, 2026.) 22 appearances and 6 top placements in 2026.

2. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 25 appearances and 19 top placements in 2026; 52 appearances and 40 top placements overall.

3. Finding Backlinks to Your Articles and Blog Posts (NAF. June 12, 2026.) First appearance.

4. Misleading ARRIS Modem Login Instructions (NAF. June 12, 2024.) 3 appearances in 2026; 16 appearances and 1 top placement overall.

5. Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow (NAF. October 5, 2022.) 14 appearances in 2026; 33 appearances overall.

Analysis

Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine led the way for the 4th consecutive week, but Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search posted similar numbers in the latter half of the week, suggesting it may be able to regain the top spot in July. Coming in with a solid third-place showing was one of my newest articles Finding Backlinks to Your Articles and Blog Posts. However, that was on the strength of two days, so it remains to be seen whether it will be a factor in future rankings. We had a weak week beyond third place, but one notable is that both third and fourth were published on June 12 -- two years apart.

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.

I have at least one big project in-progress coming next week, and I hope to have a few other articles of note in addition to the big project.

Until summer,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.