I did not want to be writing about Tom Izzo and Rick Pitino this week. You can find glowing features on each of those septuagenarian coaching legends from the past few days at various media outlets. They don’t need me to carry water for them; the two have won a combined 1,400 games, three national … Read more
So much of this portion of the NBA season feels sloggy and labored, even after you allow for the drama of multiple seedings battles—West places two through eight and also ten and eleven; East places four through six; the sewage gumbo of the Southeast Division—and the lopsided Vengeance Pageants being staged by Jimmy Butler against … Read more
Wednesday night, the Maple Leafs scored on a piece of improbably timed slapstick; Buster Keaton couldn’t have done better. Simply trying to clear the zone on a penalty kill, Simon Benoit—he of do-a-cool-punch-then-get-punched fame—put the puck around the boards. Referee Kelly Sutherland, preparing to get out of the way, tripped over his own skates, fell … Read more
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg tried and failed to block an agreement between the Trump administration and El Salvador that would pay the Central American country $6 million to imprison hundreds of people who were living in America. To make the deal happen, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of … Read more
This morning I received what appeared to be blessed confirmation from NFL insider Tom Pelissero that the Minnesota Vikings were officially out of the Aaron Rodgers (snickering) sweepstakes. I had waited far, FAR too long for this news to drop. The Rodgers-Vikings connection only made sense to media members carrying water for a desperate, jobless … Read more
On Tuesday night, ESPN MLB writer Jeff Passan shared that an innocuous article on the Department of Defense website honoring MLB legend Jackie Robinson’s sporting and military career had been removed. Trying to access the old page redirected to a new, inoperative page with a URL that had “DEI” jammed into it. The Robinson article … Read more
A week after Doug Ford (our provincial version of Trump, in every sense of the word) handily won the premiership of Ontario for a third time in a row, and within days of the announcement that some fucking banker was taking over as the new prime minister of Canada, I was in the National Gallery of … Read more
The transitive property is always a faulty tool in March, but this year, it feels especially useless. Anyone using it to predict their women’s tournament champion must first untangle this regular-season mess: No. 1 overall seed UCLA beat South Carolina, who went 2-1 against Texas this season but lost at home to UConn, who lost … Read more
On March 8, pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in his apartment building in New York by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Khalil, a green card holder who is married to a U.S. citizen, has been held in a detention facility in Jena, La. since his arrest despite not … Read more
Novak Djokovic’s players union has mounted its most significant challenge to the governing superstructure of tennis. On Tuesday, the Professional Tennis Players Association, along with one dozen named professional tennis players, filed a sweeping lawsuit in U.S., U.K., and E.U. courts against the four most powerful agencies in global tennis: the International Tennis Federation, which … Read more