2026-03-05 06:35:52
The scheduled fight that no boxing fans asked for but all of us would have watched, Mike Tyson/Floyd Mayweather, ain’t gonna happen. For now, at least. Veteran boxing insider Dan Rafael reported last night that this latest melding of sports and circus "definitely" will not take place on April 25 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as originally announced. No specific reason was given for taking the fight off the calendar.
A half-century-and-change ago, back when it was called Zaire, the same country hosted perhaps the biggest fight in boxing history, the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali vs. Foreman.
Don’t confuse Tyson vs. Mayweather with that. This one's a surefire hideousity. Tyson, a heavyweight from first fight to last, is 59 years old; Mayweather, whose best days came as a welterweight, is a ring-worn 49. Both retired from real fighting long ago, and both went out the first time in sanctioned sideshows. Mayweather’s 50th and allegedly final official fight came in 2017 in Las Vegas, when he carried MMA blowhard Conor McGregor, a boxing novice making his professional debut, for nine rounds before knocking him out. Mike Tyson’s last even vaguely authentic fight came 21 years ago in D.C., when the onetime baddest man on the planet got humiliated and stopped after six rounds by a different pasty Irish dude, Kevin McBride. These going-away fiascos each drew stout live gates and pay-per-view revenues: Mayweather/McGregor brought in a reported $600 million, which made it the second-largest PPV of all time.
2026-03-05 02:30:04
Jess McClain was cruising to her first U.S. half-marathon championship this past weekend in Atlanta when the lead vehicle in charge of driving the course ahead of her made a wrong turn with less than two miles to go, sending her and the other would-be top-three runners off the course and costing them the benefits of finishing on the podium: prestige, money, and spots on the team the U.S. will send to the World Championships.
McClain was well clear of Emma Grace Hurley and Ednah Kurgat when the incident took place, and all three had to turn around, make their way back onto the course, and finish down the standings, in ninth, 12th, and 13th, respectively. The runners filed formal appeals and protests, which were summarily denied. Per a statement that U.S.A. Track & Field gave to the Athletic:
[T]he course was not adequately marked at the point of misdirection. This violation contributed to the misdirection taken by the athletes within the top four at the time of misdirection. However, the jury of appeals finds no recourse within the USATF rulebook to alter the results order of finish. The results order of finish as posted is considered final.
2026-03-05 00:43:09
This week on the show, we were thrilled to be joined by Will Menaker. You probably know Will from his work on the Chapo Trap House podcast, but he is also a ball-knower extraordinaire and hardcore New York Knicks fan, and it was a treat to have him.
We talked about what makes the Knicks uniquely infuriating, the Luke Kornet Medium blog post about the Atlanta Hawks' Magic City Night, and why rooting for a bad team makes you a good person. We also spent the last half-hour or so talking about the state of NBA player activism and the ways that sports fandom is and is not a vector into learning about the world or developing a political consciousness. It was a fun one!
2026-03-05 00:09:00
If the 2026 World Baseball Classic is suffering from anything, it is expectation. Three years ago, the WBC ended on a note near-impossible to surpass: two teammates and future Hall of Famers facing each other in a deciding at-bat, and victory cinched by the most exciting baseball player in history. The standard now is not necessarily that the WBC will end in the same dramatic fashion, but that the success of the previous display would improve future renditions. Sure, 2023 boasted several star-studded rosters, but it could become a true best-on-best showing, with the participation to cement the WBC as a serious enterprise.
Which makes each piece of slightly negative news about this year's WBC participation feel like a knock against the tournament's hard-earned legitimacy. First, there are the insurance-related issues barring some stars from participation, after several big names were injured during the 2023 WBC. Puerto Rico was especially gutted, with Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa only two of their eight players initially deemed unable to participate, despite Bad Bunny's best efforts.
That would already be enough to give the competition a slight aroma del ratón Miguelito, but worse than the uninsured are the seeming shirkers. It is one thing for players to be forcefully barred from attendance; it is another for them to appear uncommitted to the cause. Tarik Skubal has became an example of the latter, as a participant who is just barely a participant. The Detroit Tigers ace is one of the best pitchers in baseball, coming off his second consecutive AL Cy Young award–winning year. He is also in a contract year, which explains why his only planned WBC appearance for Team USA, at least according to Bob Nightengale, will be to throw 55 likely unnecessary pitches against Great Britain before returning to spring training. (It is unclear where Atlanta's Jurikson Profar getting suspended for PEDs, the second time he has done so within the past year, and thus being barred from playing for the Netherlands, fits into this dialectic.)
2026-03-04 23:47:46
Kyler Murray will be released by the Arizona Cardinals next week. This isn’t surprising news. In fact, the only reason that Murray’s release is noteworthy is because the NFL offseason has been, to this point, so utterly inert. The 2026 draft class is underwhelming, and the UFA pool is even worse. A lot of teams are in desperate need of help at QB, to the point where the San Francisco 49ers can go to the combine and tell other teams, with a straight face, that they want a first-round pick for Mac Jones (no one has yet to take them up on the offer). That makes Kyler Murray officially “intriguing” to the Jets/Steelers/Dolphins/Vikings/Browns of this world.
The problem is that Murray’s entire career, to this point, has been far more about intrigue than production.
Let’s go back. It’s 2019 and the Cardinals have decided that one year of Josh Rosen at QB is all the Josh Rosen they’ll ever need. So with the No. 1 overall pick that April, they take a mulligan and draft Murray. He goes on to win Rookie of the Year in his first season. The following spring, then-Arizona GM Steve Keim finds himself the beneficiary of Bill O’Brien’s idiocy and gets Texans WR DeAndre Hopkins, then in the prime of his career, for next to nothing. Suddenly the Cardinals, who haven’t won a title since 1947, have a franchise QB plus a top-level weapon to pair with him. The following November, Americans stranded by COVID get to witness those moves bear tasty fruit:
2026-03-04 23:03:15
More than a century ago, the Chinese paleontologist and archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found an unusual trove in the same cave near Beijing where he found the skulls of the early hominin Peking Man. Along with the remains of a 700,000-year-old Homo erectus, Wenzhong unearthed a collection of 20 quartz crystals, one of which was a "perfectly faceted, smoky quartz crystal," the researcher Juan Manuel García-Ruiz wrote in a 2018 paper. In 1931, Wenzhong brought the quartz back to Beijing. "After washing and displaying them, I invited my colleagues to observe them," Wenzhong wrote in an article. "One colleague seemed very angry after examining them, picked up a piece straight away, hit it hard on the other stone fragments, and exclaimed, 'These kinds of broken stones can be seen everywhere on the road!'" But later that fall, the French archaeologist Henri Breuil examined the crystals and agreed with Wenzhong: The crystals were not just stones, but artifacts collected by the early humans who lived in the cave.
Since Wenzhong's discovery, archaeologists elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Europe have excavated quartz crystals from sites occupied by early humans. It's clear that Homo erectus and Homo sapiens collected crystals that were too small to be tools. Rather, these early hominins were attracted to the stones for some other reason. García-Ruiz, who studies crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain, has hypothesized that crystals were an early catalyst of abstract thinking, symbolism, and consciousness in hominins. Such a hypothesis would seem impossible to empirically test, given the extinction of Homo erectus and other early humans. So García-Ruiz turned to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, to see if they, too, experience what he's dubbed the "crystal allure."
In a paper published today in Frontiers in Psychology, García-Ruiz and colleagues prove without a doubt that chimpanzees are drawn to crystals. The researchers offered crystals to nine chimpanzees living in two groups at a rehabilitation center in Spain. (The chimps, many of whom came from circuses, are all familiar with humans.) In one experiment, the researchers placed a clear quartz crystal and a voluptuous slab of sandstone, each larger than a human hand, on two pedestals. Via a feed from a video camera, the researchers observed the chimps approaching the pedestals, noting when the chimps interacted with either the crystal or the rock. In another experiment, the researchers offered the chimpanzees a scattering of stones and crystals in the grass to see which ones they picked up and examined.
