2026-02-17 00:22:32
Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no fresh allegations of cheating curlers or references to serially violated hog lines; that mad Norwegian bastard who has mastered running uphill while wearing skis presumably picked up five or six more gold medals. The highlight of the FA Cup matches was remembering that the Wigan Athletic mascot is called Crusty The Pie, for the only valid reason.
This left a window in the schedule for a little author time, and fortunately this was the day the local tavern was tapping its annual keg of Pliny The Younger, a supremely rare and extremely good locally made and national renowned craft beer. All it required from your correspondent was standing in the rain for half an hour, waiting for the doors of the bar to open, and finding a seat in the corner where nobody would ruin the vibe by sitting down nearby in an ill-considered attempt at strained conviviality. Beer is usually a communal activity, but for the Younger, even pathological loners get a day off from judgment.
That last part of the plan sadly failed; the person in question here was actually quite tolerable and even borderline delightful, defying the well-worn stereotype that people are at their best when avoided. (If it helps, we never asked for a name and they never offered one, and good on them for that.) But the rest went to plan: the U.S.-Germany hockey game was on, the NBA All-Star Games were not, and the bar was filled with devoted day drinkers who finally had proper cover for their daily nooner.
2026-02-17 00:00:00
Our Monday crossword? It’s good. This week's puzzle was constructed by Will Nediger and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a crossword constructor from London, Ontario who uses the nom de plume Bewilderingly (an anagram of "by Will Nediger").
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
2026-02-16 23:20:03
As you may have heard, the twinned industries that produce art and criticism in this country are embattled. On every side, there is steady conglomeration, privatization, and the rapid uptake of labor-annihilating technology. In tandem, there has been a steady mainstreaming of an anti-intellectual attitude that finds criticism, particularly negative reviews, to be pretentious and without lasting cultural merit.
Reading A.S. Hamrah, the film critic at the magazine n+1 and a prolific writer on the history and trajectory of cinema at large, will convince you that criticism remains vital. For over two decades, Hamrah has honed an uncompromising, incisive voice, taking advantage of his rigorous and wide-ranging knowledge of the cinematic project so that no one film stands untethered from another. In recent years, amidst a media landscape that is overstuffed and underbaked, Hamrah has continued to chronicle the downward spiral of our time with unflinching clarity.
Two new books, Last Week in End Times Cinema and The Algorithm of the Night, collect select pieces of Hamrah’s film writing across various outlets from the past six years. As the reader moves through traditional reviews and longer ruminations on specific filmmakers and films, a novel historical document emerges, one that witnesses the degradation of an artform while also championing the independent and underground entities, whether individual people or larger movements, pushing back against a tide of slop and cookie-cutter cinema.
2026-02-16 22:01:27
In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to compete, the International Olympic Committee, in a daze, seemed to realize it was on the wrong side of history. The American Medical Association had recently come out against DNA testing in sports, and so had a formidable coalition of sports doctors, media commentators, Hillary Clinton, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and—not to be outdone—the entire national government of Norway. Even Olympic athletes themselves were railing against the chromosome tests, with an athletes’ commission recommending in 1998 that the Olympics drop their testing requirements.
There was something frankly queasy about the whole DNA testing business, which the IOC had first embraced in the late 1960s, during the height of U.S. and USSR hostilities. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, the logic of DNA tests seemed woozier than ever. When the IOC announced it would ditch chromosome tests beginning in 2000, the Salt Lake City Tribune wrote that “an unfortunate vestige of the Cold War” had finally been eliminated. Everyone seemed prepared to move on; a member of the IOC’s medical commission declared that, soon, “gender testing will be gone forever.”
The sentiment sounds preposterous today. This month, as the world gathers for the Winter Olympics in Italy, chromosome tests have quietly returned—copy-pasted from the ‘90s, just with a new sheen. Sports officials are positioning the very DNA tests they had once left for dead as a “noninvasive” and “extremely accurate” way to protect “the integrity of female competition,” the new chosen euphemism for disqualifying trans and intersex women. The international federation that governs track-and-field events, World Athletics, and the boxing federation World Boxing recently announced that all women athletes in their sports will have to sit for a chromosome test.
2026-02-16 02:29:56
Imagine yourself in the beautiful Dolomites of Cortina d'Ampezzo. The air is thin and cold. The stars blaze in the night sky above you. Inside your body is the kind of fear that empties you, that vibrates between your ears, that makes your heart pump so fast you think it might explode in your chest. You are standing at the top of the terrifying, beautiful, sliding track. It is made of solid, hard ice, just over a mile long, and contains 16 terrifying, sloping curves.
In this imaginary scenario, you must get to the bottom of the track. You cannot walk down. You cannot scooch on your butt and cry. You must choose one of the approved Olympic methods for reaching the bottom of the course so that we can learn your true nature of your heart.
How will you choose? Which of the several terrifying ways to get to the bottom of the course will you deem the least terrifying? What kind of person are you in the depths of your soul?
2026-02-16 01:58:59
Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps—and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds Sunday, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.
Here he is soaring fully out of control on his final jump:
