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The Headlines

GROW OR GO. The Dallas Museum of Art has selected six finalists for an expansion project that comes with a budget of $150 million to $175 million, the Dallas Morning News reports. The lucky firms are David Chipperfield, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Johnston Marklee, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos. The paper’s architecture critic, Mark Lamster, writes that the selection committee “has leaned in to the tried and true—with one notable exception.” That would be the Madrid-based Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which has worked largely in Europe, but has still handled a number of cultural projects, like the National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain. The winner will be named in August.

A DOUBLEHEADER. In Hong Kong, the artist JR has made a sprawling installation to mark the end of the city’s mask mandate, pasting black-and-white photos of some 450 volunteers to the floor and a wall at the Harbour City shopping center, the South China Morning Post reports. Not everyone is a fan of his efforts: Some online commenters have compared it to a memorial for a mass tragedy and noted that black signifies death in China. Meanwhile, out in Water Mill, New York, the indefatigable artist is getting ready to install an enormous photographic work on the facade of the Parrish Art Museum, the New York Times reports. It will show almost 40 running children, and JR told the paper that he was “really trying to capture that moment of lightness and innocence of all children before the weight of the world falls on them.”

The Digest

Ryan Mason picked his favourite Tottenham hoodie out of the club shop last night and lead Spurs to a credible draw. Today Pete, Luke, Jim and Vish are here to try and work out whether playing The Stone Roses as the players went down the tunnel for half-time was the turning point for Spurs.

Elsewhere, Vish is made to defend his claims that Joe Willock shouldn’t play for England - Spoiler: it doesn’t go well - and we try to work out what song Alexander Isak was singing while he dribble passed Michael Keane three times.

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Including Fast X, The Little Mermaid and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

In his opening statement in the ongoing civil sexual assault and defamation trial against former president Donald Trump, his attorney Joe Tacopina was aggressive, scathing and snarling in his attacks on E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1997.

By Carroll’s admission, her story contains inconsistencies. She can’t remember the date the assault occurred, for example, and has said she doesn’t know why she went into the dressing room with Trump that day. In his opener, Tacopina told the jury he would expose all of Carroll’s inconsistencies, show that she was indeed the liar Trump claimed her to be, and prove she made up the entire story in pursuit of public attention. 

But on Thursday, when Tacopina, a burly, muscular man with a growling deep voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, had his chance to question Carroll, a former fixture of New York media society, now 79, he hit a brick wall. Carroll parried his initial attempts to unravel inconsistencies in her story, so the lawyer proceeded to grill her on slight inconsistencies between her testimony in a deposition last fall and what she has said on the stand this week. Those efforts left even the judge, Lewis Kaplan, appearing exasperated, and snapping at Tacopina to move on. 

“Women who don’t come forward—one of the reasons they don’t come forward is because they all get asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?'”

But when Tacopina tried to challenge Carroll about why she did not scream when Trump was allegedly raping her violently, Carroll ultimately delivered a strong rebuke.

“I’m not a screamer, I was in too much of a panic, I was fighting,” she responded to his initial query.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to go after Disney last spring for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” law, he was making it an example. He chose a powerful, high profile target that had disagreed with his policy preferences, and he punished that company for crossing him. In doing so, he sent a clear warning to other companies: Disagree and I will come knocking. If he was willing to attack Disney, one of the state’s largest employers and a major tax source, no business was safe.

This is an authoritarian tactic. Authoritarian leaders use various means to control the private sector to suppress dissent and bring a powerful segment of society under their sway. But in order to make an example of Disney, DeSantis had to be clear that Disney was suffering as a direct result of speaking out against him.

Unfortunately for DeSantis, that kind of retaliation against speech is a violation of the First Amendment. When Disney finally decided to fire back on Wednesday by filing a suit against DeSantis, the governor had spent over a year doing the company the favor by making myriad comments explaining he was seeking revenge against Disney, strengthening its legal hand. As Disney predicted in its complaint, “This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see.”

“This whole situation highlights one of the hidden benefits of recognizing corporations to have rights.”

“It is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish a corporation because of the company’s expressed viewpoints on political issues,” Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law and the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights told Mother Jones a year ago when DeSantis first passed legislation targeting Disney for retribution.  

As Republican Mitt Romney famously reminded Iowans during his 2012 presidential campaign, “Corporations are people.” And for many legal purposes, he was right. Over the last century, the Supreme Court has extended civil rights to corporate entities, a trend Republicans and the conservative movement generally cheered. In 2010, the Supreme Court granted them the right to spend money to influence elections, ruling that was a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment. In 2014, the justices decided that some corporations also have religious rights.

On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson broke his silence on his surprise firing from Fox News.

After saying he’d taken a moment to step back, Carlson lamented that both political parties had cohered around a set ideology endorsed by cable news. But now, after his dismissal, he foretold an end. “This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue,” Carlson said in a video he posted on Twitter. “The people in charge know this. That’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive…but it won’t work when honest people say what’s true.”

That is funny to hear because I’ve spent the last few days poring over hours of Tucker Carlson videos from the archives, listening to what he has previously considered “true.” And, as you can see in five very clear chapters of footage, his truth has often involved promoting Nazi conspiracy theories; broadcasting racist and self-serving propaganda; spewing hate about trans people and children; and pushing the Big Lie. (You can read more about that last part here from our DC Bureau Chief David Corn.)

It’s unclear what will happen next for Carlson. On Monday, when Fox News announced they would be parting ways with the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight—one of cable’s most popular programs—the reasons were unclear. Rumors swirled as speculation about the split began. One theory focused on the legal trouble: Fox News had settled to pay Dominion Voting Systems over $785 million in their defamation trial against the news network following their network-wide promotion of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. One of the most popular perpetrators of promoting those pretenses was, of course, Tucker. Had he been ousted for hurting the bottom line? Or was it the content of his text messages, many redacted, that pushed Fox to act?

Tucker’s announcement implied he would continue broadcasting in some form. “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change,” Carlson said in his Wednesday night rejoinder, in what looks like the studio he built in Maine, which residents voted to approve. “When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues?”

In 2011, Robert Regan of Bourne, Massachusetts, stopped working as a forklift operator after being diagnosed with COPD. In 2015, he failed to pay about $900 in property taxes. The next year, the town took the tax title of his home. Bourne would eventually be able to sell it if Regan failed to pay back taxes and other fees—and under Massachusetts law, Regan and his relatives would get nothing from the sale. Bourne stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by dispossessing a dying man dependent on disability checks and supplemental oxygen.   

Local governments across the country have the right to take people’s homes when they don’t pay their taxes. In most states, extra money from tax sales go to the former owners. If a family owes $10,000 and the government sells their old home for $150,000, they can get $140,000. But in about a dozen states, the government keeps all $150,000.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could deem that unconstitutional. The question in Tyler v. Hennepin County is a simple one: Should governments be able to keep excess funds after taking and selling the homes of residents who fail to pay their property taxes? The case has brought together disparate groups from across the political spectrum, and justices on the right and left of the Court were unusually in sync during Wednesday’s arguments.

The Court appears likely to rule that those laws violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property for public use “without just compensation.” That would prevent states from keeping potentially hundreds of millions of equity in the coming years. Public-interest law groups say the benefits would disproportionately go to low-income Americans who are often elderly or in poor health.

One of the many amicus briefs supporting Tyler was filed jointly by an unusual coalition that included the libertarian Cato Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, and the ACLU.

The named petitioner in the case is Geraldine Tyler, a now 94-year-old Minnesota woman whose home was sold in 2016 for $25,000 more than she owed in taxes. Her case was argued by Christina Martin of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which was founded in 1973 by staffers of then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan. PLF has received support from allies on the right, but progressive organizations have gotten behind the case, as well. One of the many amicus briefs supporting Tyler was filed jointly by an unusual coalition that included the libertarian Cato Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, and the ACLU.

I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing. This is perhaps why my favorite game is called Dichotomies.

The game originated because my friends and I are always talking about our other friends. One night my friend Nick and I began idly categorizing people we knew, somewhat arbitrarily, as either thunder or lightning. We knew immediately who was which: Nick and I are both lightning. Our friend Ben: thunder. Alex: lightning. Graham: thunder. Lily: thunder, though maybe she has a bit of lightning too? We discussed and debated. This dichotomy is a good one in part because of its ambiguity; not everyone interprets it quite the same way, but everyone has a strong instinct for what each category might mean, and a sense of who might be which. Our attempts at categorizing people opened up some interesting questions: Was so-and-so outgoing, or actually quite shy? Did he make a big impression at first, or grow on you later? Was there a certain kind of power in being thunder and a different one in being lightning? Which would you rather be? And why was it so easy to tell the difference?

So I began to think of other interesting binaries. Another friend and I decided that some people are “men about town” and some people are “helluva town guys.” (Gender-neutral.) As I see it, a man about town is someone who always has fifteen plans that they’re running to, someone who is excited to meet new people and try new things, someone who is essentially oriented toward the public sphere and the allure of the untried and untested. At a party, they will end up talking for hours to a fascinating stranger who they will never see again, but they’ll remember the conversation forever. A helluva town guy is someone who likes to go to the same bar every weekend and drink ten beers with their best friends and say, “Man, life is so good!” But they are also someone who might know the secrets of the city a little bit, who might take you to an unremarkable-appearing restaurant that turns out to be special. They are your quintessential regular; they return, and they identify with the fact of their continuous return. Sometimes helluva town guys might find themselves living man-about-town lives—but at their core, they remain helluva town guys, even if they’re going out five nights a week. Dichotomies are, crucially, not about preference; they are about someone’s essential essence.

All summer long I thought of other ways to divide the world in half: New Hampshire/Vermont, Picasso/Matisse, punk/hippie, still/sparkling, IPA/lager, Beatles/Stones, France/Italy, Bob Weir/Jerry Garcia, glamour/charisma, hater/enthusiast, ellipsis/etc., elusive/available, green/blue, beer/shots, Yankees/Mets. Many of these pairings betray my own particular interests—you could endlessly reformulate them, and in fact I do. The best ones are pairs that are not actually quite opposites but proximate and different. So I began to play this game with people, often in groups, where you might ask someone to go around and categorize everyone, even people they don’t know well. Or, if there are two of you—say, on a date—you might go through them together and discuss who falls on which side of the aisle. I began to play it endlessly, in almost any circumstance. I started keeping a note on my phone, a running list I could pull out when someone said, “Okay, do another one.”

Juventus have got their points back - for now - but are they good enough on the pitch to make it count? Nicky’s not convinced but she does suggest Inter's Simone Inzaghi COULD be the next Carlo Ancelotti.

Today Dotun, Andy and Nicky look to Italy and the ongoing race for Europe, they hear from a listener that took Andy’s advice and saw Jose Mourinho’s Roma play in the flesh. We also ask: Can Dortmund beat Bayern in what is essentially now a 5 game season and why do things feel slightly underwhelming at Barcelona despite their huge lead at the top of La Liga?

Got a question for us? Tweet us @FootballRamble, @dotunadebayo and @andybrassell.

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***