Good morning, folks. Grab your coffee, because today’s edition has it all: a three-hour Greek epic shot on cameras so big they need their own zip code, a golf major where the leaderboard changed three times while I was writing this sentence, a walk around the course with an old buddy, and a primetime speech that somehow ended with the President’s own declassified documents undercutting his own argument. Let’s get into it. But also. How about some music?
The Odyssey Hits Theaters Today — And You Need to See It in 70mm
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens today, July 17, and if you’ve got a 70mm IMAX theater anywhere near you, that is the way to see this thing. Not “recommended.” Required.
Here’s why the format actually matters, not just film-bro trivia:
- Standard digital projection you get at your neighborhood multiplex is sharp, but it’s essentially a very good TV on a big wall. It’s built for convenience and consistency.
- 35mm film, the old workhorse of cinema, is warmer and more textured than digital, but the film frame itself is relatively small, so image quality and grain become more visible the bigger you blow it up.
- 70mm uses a physical film frame roughly five times larger than 35mm. More surface area means dramatically higher resolution, richer color depth, and far less grain even on a massive screen — this is the format Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey used to make audiences feel small in the best way.
- IMAX 70mm goes even further, running the film horizontally through the camera and projector instead of vertically, which is where you get that famous image that doesn’t just fill the screen in front of you but bleeds into your peripheral vision. It’s less “watching a movie” and more “the movie is now your surroundings.”
And Nolan didn’t just release The Odyssey in 70mm — he shot the entire film on brand-new IMAX cameras, making it the first commercial feature film shot entirely on IMAX cameras. That’s a genuinely big technical swing: the new cameras are reportedly lighter and about 30% quieter than earlier IMAX rigs, which matters enormously on a shoot with live sound and actors who need to actually hear each other over the ocean, the extras, and presumably a lot of yelling in ancient Greek-adjacent English. The lighter, quieter cameras also meant Nolan could watch dailies more easily during filming rather than dealing with the usual delays of scanning and processing film stock, and production reportedly took the crew to locations including Pylos, Greece.
The demand for actual 70mm screenings has been wild — Nolan’s decision to film the entire epic with IMAX cameras set off a scramble for tickets, with the select true 70mm showings triggering something close to a frenzy, and some fans have gone so far as booking a small stack of tickets just to see it multiple times in the format Nolan intended. So if you can find a real 70mm print near you (not just “IMAX Digital,” which is a different, lesser beast), do yourself a favor and go.
The Open Championship: Bryson’s Round 2 Is a Rollercoaster
Round 2 is underway right now at Royal Birkdale, and yeah — you’re watching the right thing. Bryson DeChambeau opened with a solid 3-under 67 in Round 1, one shot off the early lead held by Sungjae Im and Dan Brown at 4-under 66. Not bad at all.
But today has been more of a “hold my beer” situation. He birdied the 4th to get red hot, then carved his tee shot miles right into the hazard at the driveable, short par-4 5th hole, forcing a reload. Marshals actually tracked down his original tee ball in the thick rough enough for him to play it forward for a shot at bogey — a lucky break in an otherwise messy stretch. As of this morning he sits around T11 at -3, which tells you everything about how volatile the day has been for him.
This is also very on-brand for Bryson lately. He had a genuinely rough go at the Masters this year, where he needed three swings just to escape a greenside bunker on the 11th hole for a triple bogey, then left Augusta fuming after missing the cut thanks to a catastrophic double bogey on the 18th, again out of a bunker. If there’s a sand trap within 50 yards this season, it seems to have Bryson’s number.
Meanwhile, the actual story of the tournament so far belongs to a guy most casual fans have never heard of: Ole Miss alum Jackson Suber, who shot a 5-under 65 in Round 1 to grab the outright lead at Royal Birkdale. Scottie Scheffler is lurking near the top as always, and cut day chaos is in full swing with several big names in danger of an early flight home.
UPDATE (Friday evening): Well, that escalated. After turning in a red-hot second round of 4-under 66 — including a birdie-birdie finish that briefly had him one shot off the lead — DeChambeau was called in by R&A officials right after signing his card. They ruled he’d inadvertently improved his lie in the thick rough on the par-4 5th hole, stepping on the grass around his ball in a way that altered his intended backswing area, a violation of Rule 8.1. What followed was pure theater: DeChambeau and rules officials rode out in carts to the 5th hole so he could plead his case on camera, an exchange that got heated enough that he was reportedly overheard calling officials “crooks” on his way back to the clubhouse. R&A chief referee Grant Moir ultimately confirmed the two-stroke penalty, turning his bogey on the 5th into a triple-bogey 7 and dropping him from 7-under back to 5-under — good for a tie for 5th, three shots off new leader Lucas Herbert, who fired a jaw-dropping 8-under 62. DeChambeau reportedly wavered on whether to even show up for Saturday’s third round. Here’s the video:
A Round With Doug
Closer to home — literally, since this one happened on an actual golf course and not a screen — I got out yesterday for 18 with my buddy Doug. I see this guy maybe once a year, always for golf, which honestly might be the most efficient friendship maintenance plan ever devised. No texting, no small talk over lunch, just four-plus hours of shared suffering over a small white ball.
Doug decided to walk all 18. I don’t think he fully remembered what that actually means until about hole 12. But he gutted it out, we talked more in one round than we probably will the rest of the year combined, and it was genuinely great to get the once-a-year gang back together.
Trump’s Primetime Speech: What He Said, What the Documents Actually Show, and Why “Rigging” an Election Is Harder Than It Sounds
Last night President Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House, and coverage of it was unusually fractured. ABC and NBC opted to stream the speech on their news apps rather than air it live on their broadcast networks, and CNN also declined to carry it live, choosing instead to monitor it for news and provide analysis afterward, while CBS had not committed to carrying it live either as of that afternoon. That’s a real and unusual thing that happened — not a rumor — though it’s worth noting some local affiliates aired it anyway.
What Trump said
The centerpiece of the speech was Trump announcing the “immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence” documents that he claimed reveal “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election systems, opening with the line “no trust, no greatness” and pushing for something called the “Save America Act,” which would mandate photo voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements nationwide. Trump’s central claim was that China manufactured illegal ballots for Biden in 2020, sought to prevent Trump’s reelection, and illegally acquired roughly 220 million American voter files.
His whole comment was that we had transgender people everywhere? What?! Honestly, I have no clue what he was talking about there — it came out of nowhere in a speech that was supposedly about election security, with no actual connection to the topic.
He also framed the two years before he retook office as an economic and social disaster where, in his words, “the whole world was laughing at us as a nation” and the country was basically “dead.” That’s rhetoric, not a stat, so it’s hard to fact-check directly — but it’s worth checking it against what’s actually happened to prices under his watch, since he leaned on that in the same breath. Inflation didn’t just start improving recently. It had been climbing for months, hitting 4.2% for the year ending in May 2026 — the highest annual rate since April 2023 — before cooling to 3.5% for the twelve months ending in June, which is still above the Fed’s 2% target. Shelter and food costs, the ones people actually feel at the grocery store and on rent, only eased slightly to 3.3% and 3% respectively, both still running above 3%. And most of the one-month improvement he bragged about came from a drop in energy prices tied to a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, not some sustained two-year trend. So yes, inflation cooled for one month. But cost of living had been climbing for most of the year before that, which is a pretty different story than “our country was dead, now it’s the hottest country in the world.”
The twist buried in his own documents
Here’s the catch: buried in Trump’s own document dump is a declassified 2020 National Intelligence Council assessment that says the opposite of what he was arguing. That report states plainly that Russia was using measures primarily to denigrate Biden’s candidacy, while some Kremlin-linked actors were also working to boost Trump’s, and it describes China’s actual 2020 election activity as “low-level” and limited to “exploratory steps,” rather than a serious interference campaign. In other words, the same batch of documents Trump released to argue China stole the election for Biden also shows that it was Russia running an operation against Biden, and that the China threat was much smaller than he described. That’s not a partisan read — it’s what’s written in the documents themselves, and multiple outlets that reviewed them independently reached the same conclusion. It’s also worth noting this general finding — Russia working against Biden, Iran working against Trump — tracks closely with a National Intelligence Council assessment that was already declassified back in March 2021, so a chunk of what got presented as a bombshell last night was already public record.
Fact-checkers who reviewed the release quickly noted the broader pattern too: the declassified documents largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and that election officials have already been working to address, and an early CNN review found the material mostly restates issues already covered in a 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment, rather than presenting new evidence that any 2020 result was actually altered.
Why “rigging” a U.S. election is genuinely hard
This part is just structural reality, not a take. American elections aren’t run as one national system — they’re run as roughly 3,000+ separate county and municipal elections that get rolled up into state totals. Each of those local jurisdictions has its own election officials, its own machines or paper processes, and its own chain of custody for ballots. Results get tabulated at the precinct level, reported to the county, reconciled against the number of voters who checked in, then rolled up to the state, and then certified — often with bipartisan election boards, statutorily required audits, and in close races, hand recounts, all before a single Electoral College vote is cast. To meaningfully alter a national outcome, you’d need coordinated, undetected fraud across many independent local systems simultaneously, all of which are subject to overlapping legal, partisan, and procedural checks. That doesn’t mean isolated errors or even isolated fraud never happen — they occasionally do, at small scale — but “flip a presidential election without anyone in that whole decentralized chain noticing” is a far bigger lift than the phrase “rigged election” implies.
And on the guy giving the speech
Worth remembering that this same person is the one who, in a recorded January 2021 phone call, told Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state” — one vote more than the margin by which he’d actually lost Georgia to Biden. Two corrections to the popular version of that story: it was the Secretary of State, not the governor, and the number was 11,780, not 14,000. The Washington Post first reported on the call and published the audio, and it’s still one of the most direct, on-tape examples of a president personally pressuring a state election official over a specific vote count. Here’s the raw recording:
That’s the Friday roundup. Go see The Odyssey in 70mm if you can, keep an eye on Bryson’s back nine.
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