2026-04-11 01:40:13
As the back end of the NBA season mercifully burns to ash, there are still a few oblong aesthetic joys to be found. Thursday night's action featured son-to-father and father-to-son assists, the hilarious spectacle of Josh Hart and Baylor Scheierman going bomb for bomb in Madison Square Garden, and the Nets losing on purpose by 29 on Fan Appreciation Night in a game featuring a bunch of guys I'd never heard of and also this couple on the Jumbotron. Many of the contests involve at least one party trying to lose, whether for draft position or seeding reasons, which does not lead to what most people would call nice-looking hoops, though I find a something strangely beautiful in watching, say, Bez Mbeng spend all 48 minutes running pick-and-roll for the Jazz.
This brings us to the exception to this rule: the Sacramento Kings. While fellow tanking teams like the Utah Jazz are adopting the Mbeng Doctrine, no one in Sacramento seems totally aware that the Kings are eliminated from play-in contention. They held a multi-game "lead" for worst record in the NBA one month ago, and they have "slipped" to fifth thanks largely to a quixotic effort to help DeMar DeRozan climb up the NBA's all-time scoring list. In the process, the Kings are showing that, done well, tanking is not the simple, brainless practice many assume it is. It takes a certain degree of organizational alignment—from ownership through management, down to the coaching staff and thereby out onto the court—in order to, respectively: be fine with losing 10 games in a row by playing Bez Mbeng 48 minutes; sign Bez Mbeng to play 48 minutes; have 48 minutes to give Bez Mbeng without having to invent an obviously fake injury to a disgruntled superstar; and simply roll the ball out there and say Bez, it's time to cook, again, for 48 minutes.
The Kings are not doing any of that, because they are a stupid organization run by a penny-pinching owner, Vivek Ranadivé, seemingly unaware that, instead of inventing everything from first principles, he can observe more competent NBA organizations (read: any of them) and learn from what they are doing. There is no alignment and no vision. I have enjoyed watching Maxime Raynaud flip-shot his way onto one of the All-Rookie teams and Dylan Cardwell chart new frontiers in the fields of offensive rebounding and offensive fouling, but this is pretty clearly a team that doesn't know how to lose (or to win, or to win by losing). Shutting down Zach LaVine, Keegan Murray, and Domantas Sabonis was a nice start, but nobody involved seemed to think it would take more than that. When competing against well-run organizations like the Jazz or the Indiana Pacers, you have to be ready for something like the Killian Hayes renaissance.
2026-04-11 00:43:21
The only interview that the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli lists on his website is titled Filmmaker gets shot during interview, in which Borgli—you guessed it—gets shot during an interview. The short film opens with Borgli and his interviewer, standing against the idyllic horizon of Hollywood Hills, discussing the creation of Borgli’s first feature, Sick of Myself. Their conversation is sincere and frank—until Borgli is shot. The rest of the short, filmed as promotional material for Sick of Myself, is dryly funny. The paramedics go to the wrong address. Borgli insists on continuing the interview and gets shot again. The interviewer hangs his head in guilt; someone tries dangling a banana in front of Borgli’s paling face. “This is the same thing that happened to Werner Herzog,” someone on the film crew exclaims.
Such a short, acerbic and darkly humorous, says much about Borgli: He is a filmmaker who understands, very well, how to bait a public and lure an audience. The trick is to get shot by the public before you have the chance to be sincere—that way, you’ll never have to show your cards. Controversy has played strategically into the popularity of his latest film The Drama, which he directed and wrote. A week before the film’s release, TMZ reported that the parent of a victim in the Columbine High School shootings condemned the film for its “twist,” the same plot event that leading star, Zendaya, referenced on her recent Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance. (The twist will be discussed in greater detail in this piece.) At the same time, a 2012 essay by Borgli, published in a Norwegian magazine, garnered renewed attention after it circulated on the A24 subreddit. The essay describes Borgli’s romantic encounter with a high schooler, as a 27-year-old. “She was May; I was December,” the translated essay ends dramatically. Coyly, even. A recent Vulture headline asked: “How Much Is Kristoffer Borgli Trolling Us?” A lot, I think.
Borgli called, and the public answered. The internet is alive with chatter about The Drama: This is a film about gun violence, about morality, about the state of America. It's good; it's bad; it's amazing; it's terrible. I'd argue that The Drama is, above all else, a good time in the theaters. The film is cleverly written and surprisingly hilarious. Before all other grand postulations, The Drama is a movie about an asshole and the woman he wants to marry. A flaw of the film might be that at times, it feels too dependent on its own cleverness, almost foreclosing itself from approaching even more depth by cloaking itself in irony. However, these defensive pretenses fall away as we approach the ending. At the film's conclusion is a small spark of sincerity. It happens to be just enough.
2026-04-11 00:12:50
Remember the viral image that appears normal at first glance, but upon closer inspection, you cannot actually identify a single object in it? See how itchy your brain feels:
Relatedly, these were the starting lineups for Pacers-Nets on Thursday, April 9, 2026:
2026-04-10 23:22:23
My son is a junior. Junior year is the Oh Shit year of high school, as in, Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take the SAT. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take it again if I score anywhere below 1580. Oh shit, AP Calc is kicking my ass right now. There are plenty more oh shits where that came from, and they all center around that eternal source of angst for many juniors and their parents: college. The second your child is born, the specter of college colonizes your mind: the competition, the choices, and above all, the price. You and I know many parents who have been driven insane, all too early, by the college issue. They often pass that angst onto their kids, who then pass it onto their kids, and so on and so forth until you have an entire nation of people who will cut themselves if they don’t get into Harvard.
I will not cut myself if my son doesn’t get into Harvard. In fact, we’re not even going to visit Harvard, we’re just that resigned. But there are a great many non-Harvard colleges out there, and we’re out on the road all this week to visit a few of them. Oh yes, it’s the Spring Break college tour. Normally, we’d use this vacation to hit the beach, or to visit Busch Gardens in Virginia (so much easier and more affordable than Disney that we went three years in a row), or to stay at home and get on each other’s nerves. But since our son is currently running the academic gauntlet, we have to use this week to go on a school crawl. We also have to drag our other son, now 14, along with us. I promised that one we’d go out for soup dumplings as compensation for his time.
First up: a three-hour drive from our home to Faber (I’ll be using fictional college names for this story, so as not to piss off any admissions officers). Faber is a classic small college, located in a one-street town in the middle of nowhere. The place is laid out in classic fashion too, resplendent with clean brick buildings all situated around verdant quad littered with plastic Adirondack chairs. Immediately, I love it. Even at 49, I still get that rah-rah feeling anytime I arrive on any bucolic college campus. I walk around any quad and my mindset instantly shrinks back down to 17 years old. The guys here look like they could be my buds. Oh wow, their cafeteria makes burgers to order. Teenage me might have had a good time here. For the sake of all, I keep these emotions to myself.
2026-04-10 22:50:15
Spaceflight is a lot like airplane travel in that the vast, vast majority of incidents happen on takeoff or landing. More things are happening; more things can go wrong. On liftoff and reentry, specifically, the pressure and heat are a crucible in which the flightworthiness of a spacecraft is violently tested. It's important to remember that this is why these preliminary Artemis missions exist: they are flight tests. But tonight's Earth return for Artemis II will be especially squeaky bum time, given what happened to Artemis I's heat shield.
After the uncrewed Artemis I splashed down safely in December 2022, NASA was surprised to discover significant damage to its heat shield, with big chunks missing:
2026-04-10 22:28:44
It is a degrading experience to try to purchase tickets to a hugely anticipated event, and nothing fits that description better than the World Cup. So you can imagine why fans who successfully navigated the labyrinth of presale codes and lotteries and came out of it with a premium ticket might be upset to discover that their money didn't actually buy what they thought it would.
A new report from The Athletic details a devious little switcheroo that FIFA seems to have played on fans who purchased Category 1 tickets for this summer's games. For weeks, Category 1 was the most expensive ticketing tier that fans could buy into, and many of them certainly did hoping that they would be assigned a seat in the lower bowl. The seating maps that FIFA released showed that Category 1 tickets could be allocated across a wide range of seats, but certainly gave the impression that it was possible to get one close to the field.
