Welcome to the 298th 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”).

In a sad first for 2026, I did not publish any new NLJ articles last week, despite sitting on an almost-completed draft and an ongoing project that I had hoped (or hope?) to publish “today” (being the 19th). Work beckoned, so all I have for readers from my own keyboard are my 2026 Aki Basho (fall sumo) predictions (my picks are not “great” so far) and one edition of Pook-Emu Bee links. But while I did not have a “perfect” week of publishing, a perfect 2026 in Newsletter Leaf Journal mailings must continue.

Leaves from around the web

Because I did not leave my loyal readers with much to read since mailing Newsletter 297, I present our regular collection of 15 links from around the web to fulfill your weekend reading needs.

1 | Toys ‘R’ Us to Open 120 Standalone Stores Nationwide by Holiday Season (Amy Furr for Breitbart. Sep. 18, 2026.)

The retailer experienced bankruptcy in 2017 but toy sales have subsequently been growing, the outlet reported Thursday, noting some stores would be located in White Plains, New York, and Millburn, New Jersey.

I approve but it’s just not the same unless I see the Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 sections.

2 | ‘Not second screen enough’: is Netflix deliberately dumbing down TV so people can watch while scrolling? (Ralph Jones for The Guardian. Jan. 17, 2025.)

Be honest: how much attention do you pay when you watch TV? If you’re familiar with the ritual of half-watching a series or film – Netflix on in the background while you check out what your arch enemy has just posted on Instagram, say – it may surprise you to hear that Netflix doesn’t just know you engage in this obscene behaviour. It actually wants you to carry on.

I don’t have Instagram or Netflix. Speak for yourself, Ralph Jones.

3 | Eating Alone (Gabe Bullard for Longreads [book excerpt]. Sep. 15, 2026.)

Delivery food, for a long time and in many places, meant pizza or Chinese. This wasn’t by accident. Restaurateurs (and in the case of pizza, chains) refined the business model for delivery and developed containers that kept dishes in the best condition possible for the trip to a customer’s house.

This is an interesting point. Now in our more refined modern age, restaurants have food delivered in filthy Grubhub bags.

4 | Michael Jordan Wheaties Poster (Chris Shorts at Basketball Shorts. Sep. 17, 2026.)

Each poster is marked A, B, or C! And it’s on the outside of the packaging so you KNOW which poster you were getting when you picked up the box! I could have saved weeks, maybe months of disappointment if six-year-old me noticed this detail and could have said, ‘Hey mom! When you go grocery shopping tomorrow, would you get a box of Wheaties that has the Michael Jordan C poster?’ Alas, six-year-old me was not astute enough to see this and was left with enough B posters to fill a suitcase.

Fortunately, Ebay allowed Mr. Shorts to complete the collection that eluded him 37 years ago.

5 | A Gold Medal For Shooting Your Friend? (Dan Lewis at Now I Know. Sep. 15, 2026.)

The event was pistol dueling — yes, shooting other people — and for a brief, strange stretch in the early 1900s, people took it seriously as a sport. The idea came out of France, where — as Mental Floss explains — a doctor named Paul Devillers worked out in 1901 how to have all the drama of a duel without the inconvenient part where someone dies … It was, somehow, popular. So popular, in fact, that the Olympics wanted it as a competitive sport. At the 1906 Games in Athens, competitors fired at plaster dummies dressed in frock coats from up to 30 meters away, and a Frenchman named Léon Moreaux took the gold.

The Olympics just haven’t been the same since 1906.

6 | The surprising history of woolly rhinos: They weren’t always creatures of the frozen north (Paul Arnold for Phys.org. Sep. 14, 2026.)

The findings, published in the journal Science, had a couple of major surprises in store. The first was that, unlike woolly mammoths, much of the woolly rhino’s genetic diversity emerged in temperate, midlatitude Eurasia rather than far-northern Siberia.

Not surprising when you account for the fact that woolly rhinos understood hot and cold as states of mind.

7 | South Caucasus Navigates a New Order (Salome Mamuladze for Jamestown. Sep. 13, 2026.)

The South Caucasus is moving from a regional order structured by conflict and fixed strategic roles toward one defined by connectivity, competition, and diversification. Azerbaijan’s victories in 2020 and 2023 removed the conflict that had long shaped relations among the three states, giving Baku greater freedom to shape the regional agenda. Armenia is using normalization with Azerbaijan and Türkiye to overcome its geographic and strategic isolation, while Georgia is adapting to a region where its traditional transit advantage is no longer exclusive.

Interesting developments in the South Caucasus.

8 | Vatican vegetable garden goes 100% organic (Hannah Borkchaus for EWTN. Sep. 13, 2026.)

According to Vatican Media, the garden also includes garlic, basil, and a Peruvian variety of chili peppers known for its intensity. Kiwi plants were also added recently at the request of the Argentinian nuns.

I would have never thought of growing kiwis in Italy/Vatican City.

9 | The Death and Life of Bushwick / Evolution of Bushwick, Brooklyn (Steven Malanga for City Journal. Spring 2008 issue.)

Often described by residents as a forgotten neighborhood, Bushwick was once a solid blue-collar community. But starting in the 1960s, a steady barrage of demographic changes and ruinous Great Society policies battered it down. So total was the devastation that even as New York began rebounding in the mid-1990s, Bushwick remained largely untouched by gentrification. Only recently—after years of tireless work by government (especially the police), local groups, and the private sector—has the revitalization of this once-proud neighborhood begun.

I have only spent enough time in Bushwick for two BLOB DYLAN reports (see 2021 and 2024) but I saw enough to opine that it has held up “ok” since 2008.

10 | Split Ends, Crude Beginnings (Dan Lewis at Now I Know. Aug. 25, 2026.)

To most — but not to all. Because in 1989, a man in Alabama looked at that pile [of hair] and saw the solution to a massive oil spill.

The thing about using hair to soak up oil struck me as vaguely familiar…

11 | 9/11 Never Happened (Lee Smith for Tablet Magazine. Sep. 11, 2026.)

There was never any kind of cover-up; there were no “dancing Israelis” who secretly directed Arab terrorists into the Twin Towers to get American boys to die in the Middle East on behalf of Israel; and there was no controlled demolition of the towers as part of a false flag operation to drive an angry nation to war in the Middle East … Rather, it was more like the opposite: Elites across the political spectrum blunted the rage of a wounded nation determined to avenge its dead.

Interesting notes about pre-9/11 counter-terrorism failures in the latter half of this long essay.

12 | 9/11: Shock and Aftermath (David Wurmser for Center for Security Policy. Sep. 17, 2026.)

Although I had already retired in the ready reserve US Navy only two months earlier, I assumed immediately that I would be mobilized to the Pentagon. I donned my uniform. When I began heading downstairs my wife called out: ‘you can’t go; the Pentagon’s been hit!’ It was surreal, and my immediate answer showed how reality becomes detached. I said, ‘That cannot be possible, I am supposed to head there now,’ as if my intent to go down the Pentagon trumped the reality of the Pentagon’s having been hit. Logic can fail in these moments, as I personally witnessed.

Recollections of 9/11 and conducting research of terrorist groups in the aftermath.

13 | 10,033 tiny clay cats reenact the Civil War at a Gettysburg museum (Laura Baisas for Popular Science. Aug. 14, 2026.)

At the Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum, thousands of handmade clay cats depict some of the war’s hallmark moments–from Fort Sumter to Pickett’s Charge to lesser known naval battles.

Should the cats be handling the naval battles?

14 | This Raspberry Pi 5 e-ink project listens to your garden and draws the birds it hears (Simon Batt for XDA. Sep. 6, 2026.)

These days, it’s really easy to identify bird calls; all you need is a bird identification app on your phone, and you can ID a call in a moment’s notice. But what if you could have a system that passively listened for bird calls and showed you which ones it heard using beautiful art? That’s the goal of this project: to use a microphone, an e-ink display, and genuine art from the 1800s to create an immaculate set piece.

I don’t have a garden. But if I were to set this up outside my window, I think I’d have a nice collection of blue jay and crow drawings.

15 | NBA wingspans: Forget height. Basketball players’ wingspans are absurd and amazing. (Josh Levin for Slate. May 16, 2014.)

According to one study, the average adult man has an arm span 2.1 inches longer than his height. The 2014 NBA combine wingspan numbers—helpfully aggregated by DraftExpress—reveal that elite basketball players are not average adult men. The players measured at this year’s combine have a wingspan that is, on average, 4.8 inches longer than their height without shoes.

Wingspan is probably more significant than height in the NBA, but it took a while for that to be fully recognized.

Most-turned leaves from 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 September 12-18 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (NAF. Jan. 21, 2026.) 35 appearances and 16 top-placements.

2. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 38 appearances and 22 top-placements in 2026; 65 appearances and 43 top-placements overall.

3. How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (NAF. March 11, 2021.) 20 appearances in 2026; 30 appearances overall.

4. Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace (NAF. Nov. 15, 2023.) 2 appearances in 2026; 6 appearances overall.

5. Umineko When They Cry Red Truth Guide (NAF. Dec. 7, 2022.) 5 appearances in 2026; 6 appearances overall.

Analysis

We unsurprisingly had what was probably our weakest week of 2026 (given my recent lack of publishing output), but it was not far off from recent weeks. 4th and 5th places were weak this week, opening the door for the return of Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace for its second appearance of 2026 and third consecutive year with multiple weekly top-fives, and Umineko When They Cry Red Truth Guide, which has had good timing to land five weekly ranking appearances in 2026. Also of note: How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name became the third article to reach 20 weekly ranking appearances in 2026 and has now doubled its output from 2021-2025 (note that all 10 of its pre-2026 appearances came in 2023-25).

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.

At the moment, my work deadline slate for next week looks favorable, so with hope I will have a number of new articles to share in our last newsletter of September 2026.

Until Autumn,
Independence Forever!