2026-03-13 03:28:09
There's a type of unearned pride that comes with watching your buddies do well, but it carries some anxiety with it. Of course we were happy that Rohan Nadkarni, our frequent guest and lunch correspondent, was doing such good work for NBC's Sports Desk newsletter from the Milan Cortina Olympics; of course things like him interviewing Alysa Liu gave us that feeling of accomplishment by association. But there was also a whisper of concern that wouldn't go away, the small voice in my head asking, "But is he eating okay over there?" Well, I have some good news:
Rest assured that we do "get to that," but Rohan's return to the podcast after five excruciating weeks away also coincided with a very Rohan-specific turn in current sports news. And so, before we got to the carbohydrate content, we talked about Bam Adebayo's sublimely preposterous 83-point game and the noise surrounding it, how getting stunted on this hard might or might not help fix tanking, and the ways in which the NBA could but probably will not actually improve its product. The Kobe Discourse is considered; I briefly digress about Michael Porter Jr. speaking on these females. It's still a Rohan episode, but we were able to stay on topic for a while.
2026-03-13 01:53:21
On Monday, while the nation's attention was focused squarely on the war with Iran, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division announced that it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against one of the most loathed companies in the country: Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The case was a long time in the making, as it was filed in May 2024 after the great Taylor Swift Ticketmaster ticket bungle of 2022, but in the end it wrapped up quickly, with neither ceremony nor consequence. Live Nation agreed to take a number of slaps on the wrist, but was able to keep control of Ticketmaster, and with it a monopoly on the live-events experience in this country.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster first announced plans to merge in 2009, a move that would give the resulting company the ability to take total control of the U.S. ticket-selling market and squeeze everyone involved. At the time, Bruce Springsteen was vocally opposed to the deal, warning that it would essentially give the new entity a monopoly on event ticketing in the U.S., but despite the Boss's protests, the DOJ approved the merger in 2010. The intervening 15 years have seen the new company make the experience of going to any show painful and the experience of putting on any show both annoying and less lucrative than it used to be, with Live Nation operating most venues and Ticketmaster controlling access to virtually all of them. While the consent decree that was part of the 2010 deal theoretically kept Live Nation from punishing venues that did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in practice this is a monopoly.
In 2019, the DOJ strengthened and extended the consent decree after finding out about what Live Nation was doing. Not that it made anything better for either consumers or event-throwers. It took the aforementioned Swift fiasco—in which millions of fans tried and failed to purchase tickets to Swift's Eras Tour thanks to Ticketmaster's website crashing, leaving them unable to go to the show or being forced to pay through the nose to scalpers, in theory the very outcome that Ticketmaster's stupid website's bustedness is set up to prevent—to get regulators to actually try and make a real case. The outrage over Ticketmaster's mishandling of the Eras Tour led to fiery Senate hearings, and finally an antitrust case. "It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster," then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
2026-03-13 01:28:13
This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged.
Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada. The younger-kids division included a 4th-grader who was training with the reigning North American title-holder, Mack Meller, who himself competed in the event more than a decade earlier.
2026-03-13 01:02:56
The UFC and FBI announced on Wednesday that a group of MMA fighters will visit Quantico this weekend, "to host an exclusive training seminar for academy students as well as senior FBI staff from around the world." I think we can all guess which senior FBI staff member wanted the chance to play fantasy camp.
The following quote was likely delivered by an excitable little guy already wearing compression shorts and hand wraps:
"I’m thrilled to announce this historic seminar between the FBI and the UFC at Quantico," said FBI Director Kash Patel. "This is a tremendous opportunity for our FBI agents to learn and train with some of the greatest athletes on earth - helping the world’s premier law enforcement agency be even better prepared to protect the American people. Dana White has changed the game in the mixed martial arts industry and we’re extremely honored to be partnered with him, the professionals, and the UFC. We are grateful for their shared love of our nation, so that we can better defend her."
2026-03-13 00:02:44
You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of "The Young Women Leaving the New Right," a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented by, in Adler-Bell's formulation, the "overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke" (I suppose she and Adler-Bell may share the delusion that this ever was a thing), Anna dropped her flimsy, contrarian liberalism in the mid-2010s to become "a celebrated pundit of the New Right"—only to later discover, to her evident dismay and horror, that the New Right is a right-wing ideological movement of people with right-wing beliefs dedicated to furthering right-wing causes. That's rough, buddy!
Anna, you see, is "somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time" (her words), a trait she shares with literally every human who has ever existed or will ever exist, but which she, a solipsistic bigot, believes makes her too raw for the kinds of social spaces where people think a joke must do more than put a hard R on the N-word to be funny. The "humorlessness" of the left—which is to say, certain types of people correctly regarding her as a boring moron—turned her off. She was, in her words, "in love with the frisson of transgression."
For this reason Anna decided to become a fascist. Later she discovered that the right-wingers organizing themselves since long before she was born, around the idea that social progress should be reversed and rights withdrawn from certain types of people, regard her as one of the types of people from whom rights should be withdrawn. Now she wants a new scene.
2026-03-12 23:08:48
People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way to capture and hold a listener’s attention. It’s easier to stumble upon video curated and served via algorithm than it is to click several buttons in a dedicated app in order to listen to a piece of audio.
In its attempt to gain a hold on YouTube’s domination of the internet’s passive viewing population, Netflix rolled out podcasts earlier this year with licensing deals with Spotify, Barstool Sports, and iHeart, but if discoverability is any part of Netflix’s objective, it has failed abjectly with its new video podcasts, which were quietly launched at the end of January.
First of all, it’s nearly impossible to stumble upon podcasts on Netflix unless you know what you’re looking for. There’s no homepage carousel, no link in the home navigation, not even a category in the show genres dropdown menu. I clicked around the homepage for several minutes looking for a podcasts homepage before finally giving up and typing “podcast” in the search bar. This search yielded something that approximated what I was hoping for: a page of every show on the platform presumably tagged with the word “podcast,” arranged in no coherent order.
