2026-04-04 01:33:49
Tiger Woods has been charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test, following his March 27 rollover crash in Jupiter Island, Florida. In documents and public remarks, police laid out some behaviors of Woods that suggested to them that he was impaired and could not safely operate a vehicle: Woods provided evasive answers to their questions, had difficulties with the field sobriety test, and declined to provide a urine sample, which police suspect would have proven intoxication from prescription medication. In his press conference describing all this, Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek left out one thing which Woods did that many people tend to associate with culpability: In the moments after the crash, Woods used his phone to call Donald Trump.
In body camera footage released by the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the Jupiter Island Police Department, and posted to YouTube by WPBF 25 News, an officer at the scene calls to Woods as he drifts away from the scene of the crash. The golfer turns back and can be heard wrapping up a phone call. "Thank you, thank you so much," Woods says to the person on the other end of the line. "All right, you got it. Thank you. Bye." He hangs up the phone and turns his attention to the officer, who has asked him to remain by the scene.
"Yeah, I was just talking to the President." Woods says this with a little flip of his phone hand, and the feigned nonchalance of a desperate name-dropper. The officer declines the bait.
2026-04-04 01:17:32
Conspiracy theories about athlete ages are not infrequent, though they have declined in popularity recently, and it is rare that they are applied to people from the United States. However, after the release of a concerning video by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a discussion must be had about Konnor Griffin, the prospect being called up to play his first MLB game in the team's home opener Friday against the Baltimore Orioles.
Griffin is the most highly touted prospect in baseball, a potential five-tool superstar who will naturally invite comparisons to Mike Trout. If he is a teenager, Griffin would be notable as the first teenage position player to play in an MLB game since Juan Soto—not too shabby a comparison. But is he really?
Working off the aforementioned video, the evidence that Konnor Griffin is 19 is as follows: The Pirates and presumably the United States government say so, for one thing. His name is spelled "Konnor," for another. Also he evidently cannot name any women other than his close relations.
2026-04-04 00:54:45
On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) show. The Financial Times reports that the recently de-Sorafied AI giant paid somewhere in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars" for the purchase. The deal immediately prompted a great deal of online handwringing about a nominal media operation selling out to one of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, which is understandable but unwarranted. Nothing will have to change, as even the independent version of TBPN was already so dedicated to cheerleading for the rich and powerful people in tech as to have been indistinguishable from marketing.
TBPN streams on Twitter for three hours a day, five days a week. It was launched by startup guys turned streaming guys John Coogan and Jordi Hays in October 2024, and quickly rose to relative prominence: Its audiences have always been small, but audience size doesn't matter as much when the tech world and particularly so many of its most powerful people pay so much attention. TBPN has scored a bunch of rare interviews with the biggest names in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg at last year's Meta Connect. Zuckerberg famously loathes the media and does not do interviews, yet there he was, chopping it up with the boys.
2026-04-04 00:39:43
You can count on the things that mark the passage of time on Survivor. Early on, there's the very first tribal council, the first tribal swap, the first double elimination. Nothing looms larger over the early game, though, than the possibility of making the merge. For those uninitiated, at some point about halfway through each season of Survivor, the remaining contestants all join together to form one giant tribe, and challenges broadly turn from team-based to individual; so does immunity, which heightens the tension somewhat. If the early parts of a Survivor season are about figuring out social dynamics and staying alive at all costs, the back half emphasizes the strategic aspects of the game. It's where moves are made and legends are born, and it's my personal favorite stretch.
In its sixth episode, Season 50 of Survivor arrived at the merge with a monstrous 17 people. (For reference, most merges are in the 10-13 range.) This made it clear that there would be some shenanigans afoot; tantalizing as the prospect of a jumbo-sized tribal council was, there would have to be. That ended up being true, and we'll get to that, but the point is that this was a merge in the most technical sense, which situates us roughly at the halfway point of Season 50. That seems as good a time as any to gather the Defector Survivor sickos—staff writers Luis Paez-Pumar (that's me!), Kelsey McKinney, and Rachelle Hampton, as well as Normal Gossip producer Jae Towle Vieira—to check in on how the season is going, what we've loved and hated about it, and what we think will happen as we enter the very early stages of the Season 50 endgame. So, grab your torch and crack open a coconut, we're going in.
2026-04-04 00:19:16
HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but quality isn't the point. The show is a transparent attempt to induct a new generation—and market—into the lucrative fantasy world while massaging the nostalgia of existing fans. The announcement of the show has triggered another repetition of the same cycle that has repeated, ad nauseam, since J. K. Rowling started calling random trans women men to her 13 million Twitter followers. Actors in the series dodge questions about Rowling’s opinions, smiling winningly while they pontificate about how Harry Potter teaches everyone to be nice. Those in the know debate the ethics of watching the show. Meanwhile, a vast, blithe section of the press considers Rowling’s activism—or any anti-trans activism—to be interesting only insofar as they can use it to wring out another ponderous essay on the terrors of so-called cancellation.
On the one hand, you have an imaginative property beloved by millions, and on the other, there are actually existing trans people. As one of the people tied to the train tracks in said artificial trolley problem, I’d like to raise a complaint: It is beneath my dignity to let myself be run over by any trolley, and particularly this trolley, burdened as it is by a cape and a stupid hat. But I digress. Many people are unaware, or only passingly aware, that Rowling has become a full-time agitator against trans people—particularly trans women and trans kids, who she expressly believes do not exist—and that she has used her personal wealth and platform to further a suite of causes to that end, including founding a trans-exclusionary rape crisis center. Rowling helped fund the case that resulted in the 2025 UK Supreme Court judgment defining “sex” in the Equality Act as “biological sex [at birth],” a judgment she publicly celebrated with an unspecified drink and a cigar. I myself have helped document the severe repercussions of that judgment for British trans people. The Verge’s recent piece on Rowling gives a good timeline of her activities in this regard, and makes a clinically precise case for boycotting the new show as a result.
The harm Rowling has done has been less widely publicized than it should be, although it has, at least, been met with passionate opposition by many fans and ex-fans. But there are also barriers to properly recognizing and combating that harm, even among people who have heard about Rowling’s politics and find them execrable. People are often tempted to wander down the conversational dead-end that is “separating the art from the artist.” Harry Potter has historically boasted the kind of approval numbers usually reserved for, say, pizza or “the concept of joy”; fans are, accordingly, defensive about enjoying something so synonymous with childhood nostalgia. Surely watching a show doesn’t make you a bad person, does it? We all love something made under morally compromised circumstances. Can’t someone just pirate the show, or watch it through a friend’s account, and call it a day?
2026-04-03 23:56:33
You know all those photos and videos of folks lined up a million deep at airports last month? It was hard to see those and not feel a sort of ambient discomfort yourself, imagining the stress of being one of those travelers. I know I could only think about how frustrated, anxious, confused, and squished I would feel if I, too, were stuck in that mass of humanity.
With that in mind, check out how crunched the chases for the final playoff spots have become in both conferences, with fewer than 10 games remaining in the NHL regular season. These guys are all close enough to smell each other's breath.
