2026-03-19 04:35:15
March came in like a lion last night. An off-balance three-pointer from UMBC at the buzzer caromed off the backboard, allowing Howard University to survive a crazy and clutch comeback and advance to the main pool of the NCAA men's tournament.
Howard’s win, which was in a “first four” play-in game but is being accepted as the first March Madness win in school history, made me really happy. Like all of D.C., I need bread and circuses out the wazoo these days. But there’s more to it here. Howard University’s sports have been a punchline or worse my whole life, and since before I was even around, and that's a mighty long time.
2026-03-19 04:17:12
The WNBA and the league’s players’ union have reached a verbal agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, they announced early Wednesday morning. According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, the new CBA will include maximum salaries over $1 million, minimum salaries over $300,000, and a starting team salary cap of $7.5 million. Those figures represent a dramatic increase in player pay: Under the previous CBA, which players opted out of in October 2024, the 2026 salary cap would have been $1.55 million. As WNBA cap expert Richard Cohen pointed out, the new minimum salary of $300,000 is more than what Kelsey Mitchell, the league’s highest-paid player, earned last year.
Since opting out of the 2020 CBA at the end of the 2024 season, players have spoken about their wish for a “transformational” deal, one that would allow them to share in the rapid financial growth of the WNBA. “For the first time, player salaries are tied to a truly meaningful share of league revenue, driving exponential growth in the salary cap,” union president Nneka Ogwumike said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. Her statement also mentioned gains on ancillary issues the two sides had been discussing, including facilities standards, housing, retirement, and expanded family planning benefits.
The two sides met for more than 100 hours in marathon bargaining sessions over the last week, much of that time spent trying to agree on a framework for revenue sharing. Player proposals sought a percentage of gross revenue, while the league’s proposals reportedly only offered them a percentage of net revenue. The exact details of the revenue sharing system in the new CBA haven’t yet been made public—a term sheet is yet to be formalized, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said, and the agreement will need to be ratified by players—but Charania reports that players will receive an average of nearly 20 percent of gross revenue over the life of the deal. Before last week, the union was reportedly seeking 26 percent of gross revenue, down from an initial ask of 40 percent. The league had previously offered players a percentage of net revenue that the union estimated would amount to less than 15 percent of gross revenue.
2026-03-19 01:53:24
As Bryce Harper rounded the bases on his game-tying two-run homer in the eighth inning of Tuesday night's World Baseball Classic final, he exchanged a salute with his commanding officer, third base coach Dino Ebel, then moved to point at the American flag patch on his uniform. He looked at the wrong arm at first, mixing up the Stars and Stripes with the slightly larger Capital One patch on his other sleeve.
That was a fairly representative moment of how unpleasant it was to watch Team USA in this tournament, and why it was a small mercy to watch them lose to Venezuela, 3-2. With all due respect to Comrade Ratto, the nationalistic pride on display by the Americans carried a different tenor than the WBC's other contenders. Of course it would. This game featured a nation that had recently bombed and invaded its opponents'. Rather than making an effort to keep that association at arm's length, Team USA embraced it. They saw what the U.S. men's hockey team did at the Olympics and thought to follow that but have even less fun in the process.
What did that look like in practice? The Budweiser Clydesdales have stolen less valor than these flag-humping runners-up. It began well before Harper's salute to imaginary service. Inviting the looniest former Navy SEAL around to deliver a pregame speech for the team was one lowlight. Another was Cal Raleigh wearing a "Front Toward Enemy" T-shirt and being a jackass toward his actual Seattle Mariners teammate, whom he is scheduled to see every day for the next six months or so. As other squads like Italy showed it was possible to be American-born and still have fun at an exhibition baseball tournament, Team USA was gripping the bat too tightly, metaphorically and then literally in the final.
2026-03-19 01:35:59
For two seasons now, NBA viewers have bemoaned the league-best Oklahoma City Thunder defense. Not because it's physically talented or schematically savvy—it is both—but because it's seemingly built on the premise that officials cannot detect and call every single foul that occurs on a basketball court. No previous team seems to have realized that a defense could simply play this way the entire game; they are angry, swarming, and handsy. As of Tuesday night, they are also shoesy.
In the second quarter of a 113-108 win over the Orlando Magic, Alex Caruso, whose defensive chops are as peculiar and savant-like as Steph Curry's shooting, innovated by blocking a Tristan da Silva layup attempt with a foreign object: the shoe that had fallen off Caruso's left foot earlier in the possession. The Thunder guard reached out with his right arm, extended his wingspan by swinging his sneaker, and clipped the ball. It was clean in the sense that Caruso didn't make illegal contact with da Silva's body, but dirty in the sense that he used his shoe.
2026-03-19 00:13:52
Afroman, once world famous for his song about being high (though I always preferred "Crazy Rap" myself), has emerged as a new kind of internet folk hero in the aftermath of an incident in 2022 with Ohio police, when Adams County sheriff's deputies broke down the door to his home and raided the place under a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. The search turned up nothing incriminating, and Afroman, real name Joseph Foreman, was never arrested or charged with anything. Because he had been unjustly targeted by the police and felt his rights and privacy had been trampled on, as well as now having a broken door, a busted driveway gate, and $400 allegedly missing, Afroman sought vengeance the best way he knew how: releasing lots of funny music videos online.
2026-03-18 23:49:27
For almost my entire life, Venezuela has been a punching bag, a nasty joke couched in fake concern. I used to participate in some of that punching, to be clear. But as I grew into political consciousness, I struggled to reconcile, both within myself and whenever I was asked about the country where I was born and partly raised, the conflict between my slowly burgeoning leftist beliefs and what I had been told socialism did to Venezuela. I mainly took a "Eh, what can you do?" stance, if not an outright hostile one towards Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. That hostility only felt more correct when Nicolás Maduro took over following Chávez's death in 2013.
It was around that time, however, that I began to realize that Venezuela wasn't a rogue state, or some evil dominion in dire need of outside intervention. It wasn't, and still isn't, perfect. No country is, and this one was born of the imperialist context that has threatened to completely subsume Latin America. What I mean by that is that the United States decided to do its best to try to dominate Venezuela, and to make an oil-rich country subservient to the world's biggest oil consumer. The realization that Venezuela serves that purpose for the U.S. helped me understand why it was in the state it was: It needed to be beaten down by American economic and military pressure, so that it could become both a cautionary tale for the American right and a cog in the broader neoliberal enterprise. Venezuela became less a country in the American collective hivemind than a boogeyman, a place that could be pointed at as a failure whenever someone tried to consider a better way.
I was not immune to this framing, which was so common growing up in the U.S. and away from Venezuela. It has been hard, throughout my life, to feel the pride I should want to feel for my homeland, because I have had such a confused political understanding of both Venezuela and Venezuela's place in the world, and in this hemisphere specifically. Put another way, I was ignorant and unwilling to question the narrative that I had been fed. The slow process of correcting that ignorance only left me more confused on how to feel about Venezuela as a whole. I'm still working on it.
