2026-02-28 03:00:00
It is once again time to have a staff chat. We'll be hanging out in the comments, ready to answer whatever questions you have.
Update (3:17 p.m. ET): OK we're wrapping up here! Thanks for joining, everyone.
2026-02-28 02:13:37
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.
The testimony was part of a bellwether trial in California in which a 20-year-old woman, referred to in the trial as K.G.M., or "Kaley," alleges that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive and that her addiction to Instagram and YouTube specifically contributed to the degradation of her mental health. Meta's lawyers argue that the mental health problems she suffered as an adolescent were caused by separate trauma and abuse. So far, the trial has hinged mainly on the question of whether social-media addiction is possible, from a psychiatric perspective. Meta is arguing that there is a difference between "problematic" and "clinically addictive" usage, and that the company and Zuckerberg are not responsible for negative mental health outcomes produced or exacerbated by extreme use of their platforms.
Meanwhile, YouTube is arguing that it simply isn't a social media platform at all, despite its pushes in recent years into short-form video that looks an awful lot like Instagram and TikTok, as well as photo-based posts.
2026-02-28 01:46:41
A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the draw was Victor Wembanyama. We wanted a first-person glimpse of the 7-foot-5 alien.
This plan settled on the edges of my mind until the conclusion of the NBA's All-Star break, after which it took on a new intensity. Beginning in mid-February, my brain regularly cycled through Wemby-centric thoughts as I went about my day-to-day: I hope I get to see Victor Wembanyama. I wonder how many sick dunks Victor Wembanyama will throw down. What's Victor Wembanyama doing right now? There was a brief moment of panic when I realized San Antonio was playing back-to-back nights on this Eastern road trip, with the stop in Brooklyn as the second leg. Would the Spurs rest him against the hapless Nets? Thankfully, they did not.
2026-02-28 01:25:34
In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it will abandon its efforts in the face of Paramount's hostile takeover bid, leaving Paramount and the Ellison family in possession of a massive swath of American cultural production and free to make it as poisonous as they please.
WBD started walking down this road when it announced plans to unbuckle the two halves of its business from each other last summer. In this, the venerable entertainment company was simply following Comcast's lead, and not really intending to sell either its movie studio and streaming businesses or its cash-generating yet debt-saddled TV "global networks business"—but once the Ellison family bought Paramount, the WBD board clearly saw an opportunity to get a little bidding war going, and put a big For Sale sign out on the front lawn. WBD's board initially went with Netflix's proposal despite the streaming giant offering less cash than Paramount, because Netflix had agreed to buy only the streaming stuff, whereas Paramount wanted everything. Netflix agreed to pay $72 billion, or $27.75 per share, yet WBD's internal math reportedly valued the bid at closer to $31–32 per share, since WBD shareholders would get to hold onto some equity.
Paramount wanted to pay cash for everything, and offered $30 per share at the launch of its hostile takeover. In its appeal to WBD shareholders, Paramount said the Netflix deal "offers inferior and uncertain value and exposes WBD shareholders to a protracted multi-jurisdictional regulatory clearance process." This was less a friendly warning than a threat. What it meant was: The Ellison family's close personal friend Donald Trump is not going to let this deal through.
2026-02-28 00:44:49
I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one of the world’s elite readers, as you should.
There’s just one problem. I’m also reading Paper, by Mark Kurlansky. And Island of the Blue Foxes, by Stephen Brown. And Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedgewick. And a dozen other books too, all at the same time. I also paused in the middle of reading all of those books to read, in its entirety, a history of The Cars, even though I was never that into The Cars. Reading that book led me to reading an entire oral history of MTV’s first decade on the air, which led me to reading an entire oral history of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the 1980s. Oh and after that, I finally started Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, which I’m definitely gonna finish before I return to all of those other books I’m reading, like the first one I mentioned—The Power Broker. I think that was the name of it.
I’ll get back around to Robert Caro’s Pulitzer winner eventually. For now though, it sits in my Kindle library, sharing low completion percentages with multiple other tomes, some of which I haven’t picked back up in years. I also have a pile of somewhat-read dead-tree books stacked next to my nightstand. That pile used to rest on my nightstand before it grew too tall and wobbly. Now it serves as its own little extra nightstand in our bedroom. Sometimes I throw a T-shirt onto it.
2026-02-28 00:17:08
The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors and attitudes a secret, even going to court to defend their right to keep their respective and collective sweatshop prerogatives private. Or at the very least, they sued to prevent the NFL Players Association from releasing the results of its annual players survey, which gave letter grades to the league's 32 rendering plants.
Yeah, that secret kept well.
A story by our much beloved and stealthy Comrade Emeritus Kahler, currently slumming it at ESPN, released part of the survey anyway, because every secret is just a whisper to be amplified later. What results she provided indicated that the Miami Dolphins are the best team to work for, provided you're not picky about your mood on Sunday evening. The Fish were rated for the third year running as the team that provides the best working environment, and yet their results remain deeply in the meh-to-feh range. With most projections for the 2026 season putting them in the rank-to-stank range, they'd better keep the thread count up in those table linens.
