🔥The Internet is Cooked: May 15, 2026

Good evening. Here's your dispatch from the corners of the internet still fighting slop: the sad passing of NBA's first openly gay player, Doug Ford gutting outdoor schools, the Tempo's first DUB, an underground hip-hop captain worth your earholes, devastating news on Gaza still being unburied, $9 butter, and why socialism has a future even if central planning doesn't.

A quick reminder: we take weekends off. We’ve lengthened this issue given the long weekend, so take your time, sip some seltzer and enjoy. We're 100% human, queer, and independently run. If it lands, please subscribe and pass it on, it really helps!

Jason Collins, the NBA's first openly gay player, died Tuesday at 47 after an eight-month fight with glioblastoma. A fairly non-partisan view: Fuck cancer. He came out in a 2013 Sports Illustrated cover story while still active — the first man to do so in any of the four major North American leagues — and wore jersey No. 98 in his final stints in honor of Matthew Shepard. Going first is a job. He did it without flinching. It’s the grace of individuals like Jason that pave the way forward for future generations and we are grateful. 

Doug Ford keeps gutting. The Toronto District School Board, run since last May by a Ford-appointed supervisor is closing five outdoor education programs including the beloved Island Natural Science School, and also cutting  hundreds of teaching jobs next year. Translation: kids whose families don't own cottages just lost the only nature their school day will ever include. Ford has billions for highways cutting through farmland. He doesn't have it for a kid in Regent Park to learn what a fern is. Meanwhile, Zorhan just opened up soccer streets in New York City for kids in front of 50 public schools and brought a 12 Billion dollar budget deficit to ZERO. Can someone from his team please get here already!!

The genocide is still happening, in case the algo's been doing its thing to try to convince you otherwise. Drop Site keeps documenting it: seven months into the "ceasefire," ~10,000 Palestinians remain under the rubble of their homes. Israel won't let the heavy machinery in. One father in Sabra has spent 200 days trying to collect his wife's bone fragments with just hammers and shovels. 

Everybody is watching women’s sports. The Toronto Tempo got their first dub, a 86-73 win over Seattle on Wednesday at a sold-out Coca-Cola Coliseum. Marina Mabrey dropped 26 (six threes). Worth pairing with this: earlier this year the WNBPA landed a historic CBA — average salary up from $120K to $583K, max contracts from $249K to $1.4M, the first real revenue-sharing model in women's pro sports, mandatory charters, league-provided housing. Nneka Ogwumike's union pulled it off. It wasn’t due to the generosity of the league’s owners. It comes from the union's leverage. Go Tempo. Go Unions.

Butter. Is. Nine. Dollars. We have nothing further to add. The first friday meme from the team at the internet is cooked. Capitalism, baby.

Socialism has a future. Central planning doesn't. Vivek Chibber went deep this week on Jacobin and the Confronting Capitalism podcast on why Soviet-style planning kept hitting the same wall — and why market socialism can be the path forward. 

Soundtrack: dropped today: Dua Saleh's Of Earth & Wires (Ghostly International). Non-binary Sudanese-American artist's second album, features Bon Iver on three tracks, aja monet closing on poetry, Gaidaa, executive-produced by Billy Lemos. You'd know them as Cal from Sex Education (also highly rec). Saleh wrote it while filming in Wales as Sudan's civil war raged. "Firestorm" is a coastal love song imagined after the LA fires, backed by the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles. It’s on spotify but please support on band camp, buy some merch, buy the music. $10 for an album that lasts for life is better than a stick of butter you’ll use in a single batch of scones. I promise! 

Solidarity Forever,

The internet is cooked.