★★★ Rear-guard action from a retreating season. Morning seemed like liberated territory, but summer counterattacked in the middle of the day. The southern sky was the color of cigarette ash. Sunglasses on the passing faces. Sunglasses, sunglasses. A traffic cop was wearing shorts. Jeans were leaden on my legs. An error of judgment. Then I looked down and remembered they weren’t jeans at all. The office air conditioner shared the confusion, goaded into refrigerator temperatures. Then the heat fell back again. On the way home, the subway steps led up into cool air — and thence into a stalled and churning mass of pedestrians, penned off by police barricades to clear the way for a presidential fundraiser. Michael Jordan, Lincoln Center. If you had to be forced to walk around the block the wrong way, it was a decent enough evening for it.

“Every time I scroll down to the comments section of a Deadspin article I feel like I’ve just tuned into an episode of Sesame Street where The Count has suffered a debilitating stroke. ‘Plus one. Ha… ha… ha… Plus one. Ha… ha… ha… Plus one.’”

“Here are 84 pictures of abandoned or failing or flat-out dead malls across America.”

“Obama will totally be so bitter and unwilling to face reality that he’ll run again in 2016 and try to become our first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, because he is simply unwilling to relax his grip on power. This is sort of the polite and not-quite-insane version of the ‘Obama will suspend the Constitution to make himself president-for-life’ conspiracy.”
 — The thing Republicans are talking about that isn’t rape-related.

“Federal law bars outside spending groups that raise unlimited sums of money from coordinating with politicians they’re trying to elect. But the rules are so narrow — super PACs and other groups can’t share nonpublic information with campaigns or party operatives, such as how much cash is being devoted to individual races — that the firewall they’re intended to create doesn’t exist.”

We gathered some tennis experts and pals to talk tennis — please do join us. The question before us: is this going to be the greatest U.S. Open of all time? EVERYONE AGREES: YES. (Wait, even without Rafael Nadal???)

Just How Stoked Should We Be For The U.S. Open?

“Poll: Republicans really dislike Muslims”

Mr. Shaun William George Ryder turns 50 today, although that number is purely based on chronology and may not actually reflect what years of energetic living have actually resulted in. We’ll go with “Party People” here while “Hallelujah” and “Reverend Black Grape” await below. Many happy returns, Shaun.

That the Obama administration would fold so easily gives some sense of how frightened it was of a protracted fight with any kind of racial subtext, particularly one that had a subtext of black rage. Its enemies under­stood this, and when no black rage could be found, they concocted some. And the administration, in a panic, knuckled under.

— Remember Shirley Sherrod? Ah. When you have the time, spend it with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic story on the ways

that Obama chooses, or is forced to, not countenance race, in “a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.”

The weekend comes early! Highlights from now till Sunday include Michael Robbins, Miles Klee and pals tonight at Culturefix; the wonderful Ms. Badu and pals (Das Racist!) in Fort Greene; The Barneys Warehouse Sale; and of course Gremlins 2.