2025-05-10 02:00:11
Hello. It's Friday. Let's chat. We'll be down below waiting to answer all of your burning questions.
Update (3:18 p.m. ET): OK folks, we're wrapping things up here. Have a good weekend.
2025-05-10 01:53:06
At the conclusion of Tuesday's Barcelona vs. Inter match, Lamine Yamal had taken up the traditional loser's pose: sitting on the ground, his arms encircling his knees in a loose hug, his back curved in a hunch of exhaustion and dejection, eyes vacantly staring into the distance.
Something about that image made stark the irresolvable paradox of this 17-year-old and his staggeringly advanced game. Part of it was the akimbo posture, accentuating the youthfulness of his sinewy limbs, which, unlike when the ball is at his feet, made him look every bit the callow teen he is. Part of it was the emotional tenor of the moment, the blessed, childlike state into which sports can transport anyone—child or adult, on-pitch participant or TV viewer from thousands of miles away—where the result of a silly little game can send hot tears of anguish streaming down millions of faces.
2025-05-10 01:22:19
In college, I briefly and unsuccessfully raced bikes, a humbling experience that taught me that the dog in me was not of requisite size to hang with anyone who wasn't a middling amateur. Every part of racing was a drain, from being nervously sardine-packed alongside dozens of other gangly 20-year-olds to figuring out when to burn energy and when to chill in the pack so that I actually had energy to burn. I never won anything or even came close, though loving bike racing means loving the draining stuff. That's all you can count on.
This is the right way to think about professional cycling, and really any form of racing. Think about this sort of competitive framework seriously enough, and you rub up against the limits of describing or thinking about racing in cold, analytical language. Easy and forgivable as it is to roll one's eyes at a conception of bike racing rooted in romantic notions like bravery, or the virtues of suffering with dignity, those do form the competitive substrate of the sport. Like most racing sports, cycling is foremost a pain tolerance contest. Strategic thinking is centered on how to trick other people into suffering more than you. How could you not think about guts, in both usages?
2025-05-10 01:03:05
I was still reeling in the aftermath of our dog Chop's sudden and horrible heart-failure death, stunned and breathless with grief, feeling very much the way you do after taking a hard blow to the head, when all at once our Bea became a ghost of herself. She was old, and had been thinning in the way old dogs do in their final year, but still in all outward respects her loud, wiseass, insistent self, buzzing with impatience, shepherding my wife to bed at The Appointed Time, shoveling her snout under your hand and levering it onto her neck when she wanted pets: Bea.
Then, on a Saturday evening in early April, she all at once flipped out at our other dog, Grover, when he came up behind her: snarling and snapping, fighting as though for her life. We had to pull them apart. In the immediate aftermath, she was the most alarmingly depleted dog I have ever seen. She could scarcely stand. It was as though a band had snapped in there. It was as though she had spent the absolute last of herself.
2025-05-09 23:25:15
At our biweekly all-hands meeting, Jasper Wang, our Business Man, will usually share his screen with the appropriate slides. But this week, his computer was bogged down and wouldn’t load said slides. Jasper offhandedly remarked that he was paying the price for not having restarted his computer for a couple of weeks, and I similarly offhandedly implored everyone to restart their computers once a day, if not more. Immediately a horde of my coworkers began clowning my adherence to good computer hygiene, and even more so when I mentioned that I have been known to restart my computer four or five times a day.
Here’s the thing: I am right and they are wrong. There is no reason to not shut down your computer, at the very least, at the end of the day, and boot it up fresh the next morning. Their qualms were easily batted away. Oh no, what about my tabs?!?! Every browser now has the ability to restore your last session, so you can get your stinkin’ tabs back that way. (Side note: Excessive tabs are an argument for another day.) Who cares if it runs a little slow, I don’t need my computer’s full processing power and memory to write a post. It’s much nicer when you can flit around the internet at lightning speed without your browser slowing to a crawl. You are a slave to the machines. Fine, but my machine at least runs reliably and with great speed.
2025-05-09 22:58:11
It's been a while since we last checked in with Paul Pierce, the world's foremost practitioner of the grim men's lifestyle. He does some studio work for FS1 now—that tracks—and on Wednesday's episode of Speak, he made a bold proclamation: If the Boston Celtics lost Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals to the New York Knicks, he would walk to work the next day. This was quite the promise, as Pierce stated on air that he lives some 15 miles from the studio where Speak is filmed.
We all know what happened in Game 2, and we are pleased to report that Pierce seems to have actually followed through on his promise. Before sunrise on the West Coast, he fired up his Instagram account and posted a video of himself—wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a robe—leaving his house to begin his long walk. "Welcome to this journey, here I go," he said in the dark of the early morning.
