2026-01-17 04:24:25
Imagine a very orderly person who lives in an apartment with a very large dog. The two can coexist happily, with each providing necessary support to the other, but there is also going to be a tension inherent to that relationship grounded in the fact that one of the parties to it is forever lining things up and optimizing and re-optimizing counter space and the other is a very large dog, and as such will knock things over simply due to being a very large dog. This is not an argument against continuing to line things up just so, of course. It just means that the very orderly person will over time become a very familiar face to the people at The Container Store, to the point where they might remark to each other during their breaks about having seen him, again, purchasing more of those stackable, breakable containers that he's always getting.
This is probably not the best way to understand the interplay between New York Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns and team owner Steve Cohen. The relationship is much more prosaic, really, and fairly common to the world of finance, where Cohen became rich enough to buy the Mets; it boils down to that between an impulsive and very rich boss and a high-performing employee whom the impulsive boss trusts but will still sometimes overrule when bored or aggravated or just moved to do so. There is no reason why these two parties can't coexist, and the two both help and need each other in meaningful ways. But there is still going to be a mess every now and then.
It is not quite accurate to say that the MLB offseason had been process-forward until Kyle Tucker signed a four-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday evening. Different teams have different processes, as well they should, and the few teams that had ponied up for high-end talent were not just doing so because they had pivoted to Very Large Dog mode. When the Mets, who were along with the Toronto Blue Jays reportedly co-runners up for Tucker's services, signed the former Jays shortstop Bo Bichette to an astonishingly player-friendly three-year, $126 million deal on Friday, it was probably somewhat closer to Very Large Dog behavior; the Mets will lose their first-round pick next year as a result of signing a player to what amounts to what amounts to a one-year, $42 million contract to (reportedly) play third base, a position he has never played in the majors. But if this is not something that the patient and process-oriented Stearns would ordinarily do, it is also not happening in a vacuum. It is happening, instead, in the stupid part of baseball's free-agency period.
2026-01-17 03:55:41
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have an unused spare room, a crowded gallery wall, and a (partial) resolution to my ugly bathroom sink.
Sean asks:
We just de-Christmased the front room of our 125-year old bungalow in Denver and are kinda stuck on how to make it more useful for us. It's main non-Christmas season use is for the dogs to bark at delivery people between drooling and farting on two chairs we found on FB Marketplace. I totally get that back in the day people greeted guests and probably sat by the fire and read the newspaper on Sunday mornings in these rooms, but what do people do with them now? Any guests we have end up around the kitchen counter and sometime between the ’70s and 2000s the fireplace/chimney was used as a furnace vent, so it's inoperable.
We already have a den with a sectional and a TV, so my partner would prefer not to replicate that in this room since there's only a dining room and no doors between them. We already have a workout space and our offices elsewhere in the house so those aren't appealing options either. Two cats joined our pack in the last year so all the plants/hanging vines have been relocated or downsized, so we have a lot of flexibility but no good direction. Got any ideas on how to make this more functional in 2026? Tax return season is almost upon us so want to start considering/pricing out some options.
2026-01-17 01:22:37
It may seem like they’ve been around forever, but the crossword as we know it is barely a century old. They started in the New York World in 1913, where it was originally called a “word-cross.” Going on to obsess writers like T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly wrote the first Russian-language puzzle as a teenager, the crossword settled into a kind of urbane normalcy over the course of the 20th century, a feature of newspapers and cheap jumbo packs dominated by the editor Will Shortz. More recently, puzzle games, particularly those created and owned by the New York Times, exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns, forming an unlikely bedrock alongside other mobile games for the financial vitality of papers of record.
Cruciverbalist and crossword constructor Natan Last’s recent book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle supplies a history of the game, but also compelling perspectives on its evolution: From an unlikely early 20th-century American craze the New York Times once compared to disease, to a thriving and idiosyncratic subculture, a point of artistic inspiration, and a forum for politics and social mores. After all, the vocabulary treated as common enough for millions of players to grasp, written in an increasingly globally dominant language, is chosen by a group of biased individuals, each of whom bring their own worldview to the form. As Last writes, “There are puzzle-makers who invest their political essences into the grid; there are those who reject the notion the grid should be anything more than a zone of play, Huizinga’s magic circle become square. The crossword traffics in at least two distinct registers of language: the pun clue’s dad joke, and the trivia clue’s prodding for erudition.”
Recently, Last and I discussed the crossword’s democratization, the labor of both editing and solving, the limits to which the puzzle can be a political tool, and whether we’re playing through a boom-and-bust cycle of digital gaming.
2026-01-17 00:53:26
It's hard to pinpoint the moment that Jonathan Kuminga first became disenchanted with the Golden State Warriors and their management, so we will have to start the clock with the trade demand that sparked the latest stage in their preposterous standoff. By that reckoning this is merely Day Two of Kuminga Held Hostage, and yes, it's already stupid.
But we all knew it would be. When a trade period begins with no trade, no predictions of a trade, and the advertised likelihood that no trade may happen until the summer, you've got something special. And by special, we mean staggeringly tedious.
Kuminga and the Warriors have been a mismatched set almost since the day he was drafted. That was five years ago, and the only thing that has actually been accomplished over the course of that relationship is that Kuminga has four years into his pension. He was a central part of the team's two-track plan to introduce a wave of young players who would allow them to stay at contender level after Stephen Curry ascends into heaven/fades into retirement; the other cornerstones of that gambit were James Wiseman and Moses Moody, which is why that plan died in the dirt. The Warriors have only succeeded in getting three years older, Wiseman has already been traded twice and has had health issues throughout his career, and Moody has slowly become a reliable 24-minutes-per-game guy, for what that may be worth. Curry, for his part, remains every bit the Stephen Curry he was when the succession plan was first devised.
2026-01-17 00:20:45
In light of the Trump administration's escalating threats of military action overseas and the militarized occupation of Minneapolis, the administration's announcement on Jan. 11 may have come as a surprise. The White House, it seems, will be ending the war on protein, per a tweet with the words "WE ARE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN" emblazoned over an ominously hazy photo of some haunted specter assuming the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., white hair and deeply furrowed forehead dissolving into a shroud of darkness like Homer into the hedge. The tweet links to a website, realfood.gov, where three foods—a slab of steak, a carton of whole milk, and a floret of broccoli—converge to reveal another slogan: "Real food starts here."
What war on protein? you might ask, if you live in the United States or have seen an advertisement for one of this nation's increasingly deranged purchasable foodstuffs. I will admit that I participate in this culture. I have tried and enjoyed the Eggo Buttermilk Protein Waffles and the Barilla Protein+ Penne. Sometimes after working out, I drink a protein juice with the flavor "Fuzzy Navel" (I am not proud of this). If there has indeed been a war on protein, surely Protein must have pulled off a flanking maneuver, soldiers massacred by the battalion by Starbucks' new lineup of Protein Lattes, featuring protein-boosted milk and "a variety of protein cold foams"; regiments splintered and picked apart by the 20g of whey protein isolate in Pure Genius Ready Clear Protein Water; POWs dispatched ruthlessly by Khloe Kardashian's Khloud protein popcorn. A moment of silence for all the lives lost in this needless war.
Of course there is no such thing as the war on protein, which is shockingly even faker than the war on Christmas. The nation is more protein-pilled than ever. Would a nation enmeshed in such a war create the Dunkin' Donuts Megan's Mango Protein Refresher as a part of a campaign with Megan Thee Stallion playing her alter ego, "Pro-Tina?" We are living in a moment of peak protein propaganda, and research suggests that, on average, adult Americans are already eating 20 percent more protein than we need—so much that it might be giving us kidney stones.
2026-01-16 22:57:17
On Dec. 15, the Buffalo Sabres finally fired general manager Kevyn Adams, and no, there wasn't some kinky backstory. As Comrade Theisen explained, owner Terry Pegula just got kind of sick of him, or more properly, his results. When he was hired, the Sabres had already missed the Stanley Cup playoffs for 10 consecutive years, and never saw them in his five years and change in the leather chair. That he was fired on a three-game winning streak out west seemed not to matter; hope had been abandoned years ago, and attendance reflected that truth. The town only has the Bills and the Bulls, the Division I college team, and lost its pro women's hockey team, the Beauts, three years ago, so the Sabres stood out for not standing out, or up.
But an odd thing happened when Adams was excused from further migraines. The Sabres stopped sucking. They came home and beat Philadelphia and the New York Islanders, and other than the very occasional hiccup have won ever since. Thursday night they outlasted Montreal, 5-3, for their 15th win in 17 games.
