2026-03-18 00:02:34
It's always good when the NBA tells you when it plans to do something it has already decided to do. You can think of the NBA's all-but-announced expansion gambit as a hamster wheel. Not as a piece of exercise equipment for indentured rodentia, but as a consumer product—you get the wheel either because you already have a hamster or because you're going to purchase one in about 10 minutes, since you're already at the pet store (nobody really dabbles in rescue hamsters). Either way, it's not an impulse buy.
So it is with NBA commissioner and astigmatic cadaver impersonator Adam Silver's declaration that the NBA Board of Governors—that's BOG, as opposed to GOB (Gang Of Billionaires)—is going to meet next week on the topic of expansion, almost certainly to Seattle and Las Vegas. This raises some obvious questions, none more obvious than whether the league has enough talent to expand when it already has eight to ten teams currently doing everything they can to avoid winning. And the obvious answer to that obvious question is "What the hell does basketball have to do with the NBA's business?"
Expansion is one of the few topics that could get people's minds off the NBA's plethora of perceived shortcomings, because it is something new in a continent full of what's old. Or sort of new—everyone that pays attention to the league has known the two expansion cities involved for years without ever actually being told, proof that just because a league is secretive doesn't mean it can't still be transparent. Las Vegas will be the more expensive of the two franchises—think not of the $7-10 billion proposition quoted by insider sources (whoever they are), but likely well past $10 billion. This is only because Golden State is valued at $11 billion by Sportico, Forbes, and CNBC, the highest-ranking troika of organizations in the industry of pulling numbers out of thin air. Team ownership is a status game, and the competition between bored billionaires will be fierce enough to raise the price to one that would make a billionaire's heart rate quicken. Don't forget after all that Snoop Dogg once offered a billion to lead a consortium to buy the Ottawa Senators for Christ's sake, currently ranked 29th of the 32 NHL franchises, an indication of the intoxicating nature of sports ownership even as the rest of the planet becomes a charnel house.
2026-03-17 23:42:23
On March 10, the Bigfoot Society noted an "unprecedented" multi-day mass migration of bigfoots—possibly bigfeet—in the vicinity of Portage County, Ohio. The "unidentified bipedal hominids" were moving southeast in a "coordinated movement." Two bigfoots were spotted around Mantua on March 6 and 7, at least one of them making "auditory grunts." Three more bigfoots were spotted on March 9; a sixth bigfoot—a big sucker, 10 feet tall—was seen the next day, around Newton Township. Before you scoff—you cheap skeptic, you ignoramus, you fool—you should know that the Bigfoot Society considers all of these sightings to be "high-credibility reports," so put that in your damn pipe. The Bigfoot Society continues to track what it has dubbed "The Ohio Bigfoot Flap."
Why are the bigfoots moving? Good question. Today, just after 9:00 a.m. ET, in that same region of northeast Ohio, a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere and kerploded, rattling windows, toppling delicate shelf-top arrangements, and startling the bejeezus out of thousands of unprepared Rust Belt types. The National Weather Service tracked the meteor, and a guy with a "bus garage camera" caught some video. The meteor was clearly visible in the sunny morning sky, because it was a huge raging ball of extraordinarily hot flaming space rock. Look at this!
2026-03-17 21:31:50
Chip-maker Nvidia became a multi-trillion-dollar company the classic way: by selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush. As the generative AI bubble swelled and distended, Nvidia was there to sell the GPUs needed to feed it. Today it owns more than 80 percent of the market for chips involved in AI. This has been great for its shareholders, and less than great for anyone looking to purchase consumer electronics at normal prices.
But Nvidia's roots are in video games, still one of the most processing power–demanding things the average person interacts with on a regular basis. It has supplied graphics processors to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. At a presentation on Monday, Nvidia introduced its newest technology, bringing generative AI to gaming. And it looks mega-butt.
2026-03-17 21:03:52
The greatest betrayal of my life was when my little sister texted the group chat a screenshot of the movie Goat with a demand to "clear your calendars," and over my protests, my older sister agreed, saying that she was "actually dying to see this movie." The screenshot my little sister provided declared that ANDRE IGUODALA IS IGGY THE REF, a zebra, which was burying the lede. As it turned out, not only is Andre Iguodala Iggy the ref, but Stephen Curry (on top of producing the movie) is Lenny Williamson the giraffe, Nicola Coughlan is Olivia Burke the ostrich, and Gabrielle Union is Jett Fillmore the black panther. Also, Dwyane Wade is Rosette the bull, Angel Reese is Propp the polar bear, and A'ja Wilson is Kouyate the American alligator.
In accordance with sibling duty, we all went to see the movie for my little sister's 20th birthday, which meant that the three of us were the only childless adults over the age of 20 in the theater. The previews advertised such movies as an uncanny valley Cat in the Hat adaptation; The Super Mario Galaxy Movie; another animated joint, The Pout-Pout Fish, starring Nick Offerman as the Pout-Pout Fish; and The Sheep Detectives, a film in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston voice, respectively, Lily the Shetland sheep and an unnamed black Castlemilk Moorit sheep (I would like to watch this movie). After Goat ended, a small gaggle of nephew-style children debated the Jett Fillmore character's levels of "unc" and "gyatt." Safe to say that my sisters and I were not the target audience for this film.
I am choosing not to have many opinions about the movie itself, which was animated very charmingly and told a classic sports tale about dreaming big, paced like 20 music videos stitched together. I can say that I was never bored. Also, I did learn a lot of facts, some of them about animals, and all of which I now take as fundamental truth and will incorporate into my worldview. The facts I have managed to retain over the past 24 hours are listed here:
2026-03-17 02:00:08
Arsenal's blunt-object dominance of the Premier League has given non-Gooners little to enjoy this season. It's not much fun to watch a team set-piece and defend its way to a title, even if the whole point of soccer is to win games by any means necessary. I don't have to like it, and I don't have to respect it, but Mikel Arteta has cracked the code that has eluded so many previous Arsenal sides: score more goals than you concede. I know, real rocket surgery here, but Arsenal has almost entirely abandoned the aesthetic pursuits the club used to hang its hat on in favor of a win-at-all-costs mentality that has earned the club disdain and points in almost equal measure this season.
Of course, if it were not for the so-called haramball deployed by Arteta and his band of soon-to-be Premier League champions, would Max Dowman's maiden Premier League goal have hit quite as sweetly as it did on Saturday?
2026-03-17 01:37:30
On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: Your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really good on the red carpet. This year, the big winner of the red carpet was the brooch. I would say that these are not your grandmother's brooches, but they quite literally are your grandmother's brooches. The hottest men (and some women) in Hollywood are pinning butterflies and shrimps and flowers to the lapels of their coats just so that the light catches them and shines.
It was not the first time that brooches have appeared on the Academy Awards red carpet—fashion icon and beautiful man Colman Domingo has been wearing them for years to Hollywood events—but this year they reached saturation. Every big leading man, it seemed, had a brooch on, and if they didn't have one on at the award show, they sure as hell had one on at the afterparties.
Let's look at a few of the best from Sunday night's awards. Here is a closeup of Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, at the Vanity Fair afterparty, and look at those stunning, star-shaped brooches on his lapel. I love the addition of the pink one as a little pop of color. The placement of all three in a triangle also mirrors the triangles created by the suit jacket and the lapel itself, which I find very satisfying.
