Friday Links Roundup: September 4, 2026

The following have recently crossed my desk.

• Josh Marshall writes in Talking Points Memo about “Colonel” Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, and how he fooled everyone: “So how is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona?” (h/t Mark Liberman at Language Log)
• Elizabeth Conner has written a piece on growing up Orthodox in the South.
• The Institute for Family Studies has put out a whitepaper titled “Toward Associational Data Rights: A Digital Economy for Families & the Common Good.”
• The photic sneeze reflex—where you sneeze due to sunlight or just bright light—has another name, which is (and I am not making this up) ACHOO: Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst. That’s some Congress-level backronyming.
• I was more amused than surprised to discover that many of the default behaviors in Emacs that I thought “Oh, I should look at the documentation and figure out how to tweak that” are, in fact, tweaked in the “newcomers-presets” theme included with the recently-released Emacs 31. Which means I’ve been a newcomer longer than the millennium’s been around, since I think I started using Emacs in 1998.