2026-02-03 23:17:10
It was a bonnie morning 410 million years ago in what are now the Rhynie chert fossil beds in Scotland. The mists had begun to lift and swirl over the landscape, where hot springs burbled, lichen papered over rocks, and worms slithered as only worms can. Here, almost all life stayed close to the ground. The second-tallest organism at the time, a plant called Cooksonia, grew to a few centimeters at most. This made Prototaxites, an organism with some species that towered above these landscapes at heights of up to 26 feet, an actual behemoth.
Prototaxites was a strange sort of life form. It had no branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, nor a discernable root system. Instead, it resembled a beautiful sausage sprouting from the ground. In this way Prototaxites was ahead of its time: undeniably phallic in a time long before phalluses existed.
2026-02-03 22:33:09
Hopefully you have not already heard, but the Charlotte Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the NBA. LaMelo Ball is for once an aptonym, Brandon Miller is playing like Paul George (laudatory) instead of playing like Paul George (derogatory), and Kon Knueppel is going nuts from three. It's all working, for what feels like the first time in a decade. So this week on Nothing But Respect, we invited on Mother Jones editor Jacob Rosenberg, because he's a smart, hilarious person and also a Hornets fan.
We of course began with a Dan McQuade tribute, as he is in all of our thoughts this week, and the Sixers just honored him in more ways than one. The three of us planned to talk about way more than the psychic geography of Charlotte and the bizarre, mostly awful history of the Hornets, but Jacob did so much research that the only non-Charlotte thing we got to was itself actually something that took place in Charlotte, as it involved Steph Curry.
2026-02-03 22:00:00
NEW YORK — On day one of the Westminster Dog Show, the Westminster Kennel Club hosted a Judging Insider program, where longtime judge Michael Faulkner helpfully pulled back the curtain on what actually goes into judging dogs and bitches (a strict technical term in the dog show world, and one which is used with a regularity that is startling if you're not used to it). How do you decide which of 33 seemingly identical Pomeranians is the best Pomeranian?
Faulkner emphasized that the dogs in the Best in Group or Best in Show categories, which feature multiple breeds, are not judged against each other, but are judged on which dog comes closest to its individual breed standard on that day. Barring disqualification for flaws such as signs of aggression or incorrect size or coloring, judging should always be on the positives of the dog, rather than the negatives.
In order for a breeder to become a judge, the American Kennel Club requires 12 years experience in the sport at all levels, and at least four champions bred across five litters. As Faulkner, who breeds Golden Retrievers, riffed, "it takes longer to become a dog judge than a brain surgeon." But for all of the education and the standards and the rigamarole, the supposed quality of a dog is undoubtedly subjective. Faulkner’s descriptions of dog standards conveyed the, idiomatic importance of, say, an Australian Cattle Dog’s head and jaw shape for surviving the potential consequences of "get[ting] kicked by a cow." He offered rapturous remembrances of the dogs that spoke to him in the ring, like a German Shepherd that "gave me goosebumps; when she went around the ring, I felt every muscle in her heart pound." It's an art and a science.
2026-02-03 03:59:33
Thanks to the eerie longevity of its recent greats, men's tennis has been preoccupied with endings over the last few years. It's all about legacy, the decision to retire, the tally of major titles once the rackets have been set down for good. All of it is almost a little morbid. How refreshing that the game's greenest superstar is reorienting the conversation around beginnings instead, because no career in men's tennis has ever started quite like that of Carlos Alcaraz. No man had ever seized all four of the sport's biggest trophies by the age of 22, a labor that the Spaniard completed Sunday by defeating Novak Djokovic, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5, to win the 2026 Australian Open.
Going into this season, Alcaraz had won the three other majors, twice apiece, but in Melbourne he had never advanced past the quarterfinal stage. There was no reason to think he couldn't; his success on outdoor hard courts had been demonstrated amply at other stops on tour. This year, he pushed through bodily distress and one of his most difficult opponents to finish the job and secure the career Grand Slam. To even think about a 22-year-old's "legacy" right now would feel wrongheaded. How can you be looking forward and not straight at him? His staggering talent, and his very style of play, demand that any observer stay locked into the present moment, so as not to miss a single swagger, smile, or deranged moment of improvisation.
Alcaraz's title run only ever looked in peril at two moments. The first occurred during his semifinal against Alexander Zverev, the opponent who cut short his 2024 run in Australia by serving him off the court. This year, Alcaraz had won his first 17 sets at the tournament, including the first two over Zverev in that semifinal. Carlitos seemed bound for straight-set victory when he started to cramp late in the third. He took a controversial medical timeout—cramps are not technically grounds for a medical timeout—vomited into a towel, drank some pickle juice, and proceeded to hobble around the court like a pirate for the better part of two sets. Zverev, dilly-dallying fatally, needed tiebreaks to win the third and fourth sets. He went up a break in the fifth and had an opportunity to serve out the match. Instead, the greatest mover on tour recovered the feeling in his legs and claimed the next three games to win in five hours and 27 minutes, the longest semifinal in tournament history and one of the strangest victories of his young career.
2026-02-03 02:26:53
In 2012, a self-published author of erotic Twilight fanfiction, whose books had gained a large fan base online, was offered a seven-figure contract by a major American publisher. E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would become the three bestselling titles of the 2010s in the U.S. (even Fifty Shades Freed, the now mostly forgotten end to the trilogy, outsold The Hunger Games). They would also sell over 150 million copies worldwide across 52 languages.
The impact was immediate: Op-eds were written. Bad prose was excerpted. Stock photos of fluffy handcuffs appeared everywhere. And, amidst all the endless discussions about ethical BDSM and "mommy porn" and what, exactly, women might want, fanfiction had suddenly become highly lucrative. Instead of asking what Fifty Shades meant for women, people should have been asking what it meant for publishing.
Some fanfiction authors and readers have always been deeply opposed to monetizing fanworks, seeing it as a fundamental betrayal of fanfiction itself. But the eruption of a subterranean erotic world into mainstream publishing has had more seismic effects than just irritating fanfiction purists. Fanfiction-originated romances, erotic and not, have an eye-catching presence in most bookshops now; this has fueled ongoing culture war content about the feminization of contemporary fiction, the degradation of literary standards, and whether men can even sell books anymore. Plus, the spectacular example of Fifty Shades has given fanfiction adaptations a reliably pejorative connotation. Adapting fanfictions can attract a very invested fanbase, but it has also always been freighted with accusation: of bad, melodramatic, cheap writing, and even of plagiarism, or a more nebulous kind of cheating.
2026-02-03 02:03:30
NEW YORK — People are talking about boxing again! Sure, it took a guy getting his hairpiece punched off his head to do it, but why complain?
Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, 317-pound heavyweight Jarrell Miller got hit so hard his hair fell off. No, not figuratively. Miller's hairpiece was actually loosened up by the force of a straight left to the face he took from his 288-pound opponent Kingsley Ibeh, with about a minute left in the second round. Then a quick and equally stout Ibeh right got his head rug flapping. The poor pelt peeled back further during some infighting between the big lugs and an exchange of blows as the round ended.
