2026-03-27 04:13:49
Exactly one year ago today, Real Madrid Femenino appeared to be on the precipice of a new era. After five years of institutional disinterest and mediocre results, Las Blancas had at last achieved a feat worthy of the club it had until then borne in name only. Back then, in the first leg of its Champions League quarterfinal, Madrid welcomed Arsenal onto its swampy pitch and upset the Gunners, 2-0. Madrid then one-upped itself the following weekend, outplaying and beating the mighty Barcelona for the first ever Blanca Clásico victory. Those two triumphs, easily the biggest wins in the club's short history, were laudable in their own right, but were most important for the implicit promise within them: the idea that maybe, finally, Real Madrid was ready to cast off its self-imposed restraints and start the work of becoming the kind of team it could and should be. One year on, it's now clear that, unfortunately though unsurprisingly, the club's actual fate has not proven so inspirational.
Real Madrid wasted little time popping the bubble of hope it had done so well to create back in March of 2025. A couple days after that Clásico win, Real flew to London and got summarily thumped by Arsenal in the quarterfinal return leg, 3-0. Ousted from the Champions League, they then capitulated in the run-in of the Liga F title race that the unexpected Clásico win had gotten them back into. This season has been a turn to unremarkable form. Las Blancas are once again a lock to finish second in the league, but have never been serious challengers to Barcelona's domestic crown. Their Champions League form has been decent, earning them entry into the quarterfinals via a win over Paris in a play-in tie, but Real's European story will once again end at that stage of the tournament. There have been four subsequent Clásicos since that potentially transformative one last March, and Barcelona has won each and every one of them, by a cumulative score of 16-2. The most recent Spanish Derby came on Wednesday in the UWCL quarterfinal, where Barcelona plastered Madrid, in Madrid, by a score of six goals to two.
2026-03-27 03:21:18
There is no dignified way to promote a book. Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated is a longtime friend of the pod and always a welcome guest, but she is also a busy woman—busy on the bargaining committee for the Sports Illustrated Union, busy covering the women's NCAA tournament on the West Coast, busy having deeply held opinions about sodas most people don't know exist. But as the co-author (with Jordan Robinson) of Court Queens, a new coffee table book about the history of women's basketball, she is also compelled to take a break from all that important work to go on a podcast with two hooting dunces to discuss that book, and basketball, and sodas.
Friends: We were those dunces. We're grateful that Emma took the time to join us for what wound up being a wide-ranging chat about history, labor, women's hoops, Opening Day gripes and grouses, and the triumphant-ish return of Mr. Pibb. A classic Emma episode, in short, even though she was recording it from the road and had to dip out after 45 minutes for a negotiation session.
2026-03-27 02:44:28
The International Olympic Committee announced Thursday that any athletes who do not pass a specific chromosome test will be banned from competition. This means that trans women will no longer be able to compete in the single largest showcase for women's sports in the world, and neither will any women who test positive for having the SRY gene. The implementation of this policy could lead to similar bans elsewhere in sports, as athletic organizations often take their cues from the global sports powerhouse. The new rules will kick in for the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The 10-page policy doesn't provide much detail on how and why the IOC, under the leadership Kirsty Coventry, the first female president in IOC history, reached its decision. The policy recaps a lot of closed-door bureaucracy with little explanation. Olympic leadership "conducted a broad-based review" of women's sports. That leadership decided it needed a "working group." The working group talked to a bunch of unnamed "specialists." And the working group reported back to the IOC, which came up with the ban. The New York Times did name one person involved in the decision-making: Dr. Jane Thornton, a former Olympic rower and the medical and scientific director for the IOC, but the same article said the analysis presented by Thornton "has not been made public."
So while the new policy makes many assertions—men have advantages over women in sports, all contact sports are more dangerous for women than men—there are few explanations given. No scientific papers are cited. No research is detailed. No citations or attribution can be found. There isn't even a hyperlink. Everything is stated as fact. This includes a statement that "genetic screening for sex does not create significant problems in practice," despite the entire history of gender testing creating problems in practice.
2026-03-27 01:33:15
Oftentimes toward the end of a basketball game that is sort of but not especially close, one team will take a multiple-possession lead with only a little bit of time left, and I, despite having watched the Indiana Pacers stage what felt like dozens of miracles last year, will wonder what the point is of watching the few grim minutes of free throws that conclude those sorts of contests. But sometimes there comes an ending so funny and so stupid that it reminds me: The tail ends of games are always worth sticking around for, because something amazing could happen. Something, in other words, like what happened in Minneapolis Wednesday night.
In retrospect, a Houston Rockets–Minnesota Timberwolves matchup is ripe for a hilarious ending. Minnesota, especially without Anthony Edwards, can be maddeningly inconsistent, prone to prolonged bouts of brainlessness characterized by clusters of turnovers. This is the team that lost on a 39-8 run to the dregs of the Milwaukee Bucks last year. Houston, meanwhile, is incapable of running even vaguely functional offense under pressure, thanks to the combination of coach Ime Udoka's insistence on playing a bunch of 6-foot-9 guys who can't do anything; the dour, isolationist presence of Kevin Durant; and Alperen Sengun's plodding style. The Rockets came to Minnesota with a 1-6 record in overtime games.
Last night's first collapse belonged to the Wolves. With just under four minutes left, Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels stripped Durant and got an easy dunk to give his team an 11-point lead. Houston immediately popped a 12-0 run in response, and exhaled a sigh of relief as McDaniels left with an injury. The Wolves recovered their composure to take a one-point lead with 28 seconds left. Rudy Gobert then fouled Sengun (and fouled out of the game) while the ball was still out of bounds on an inbound play, allowing Houston to tie it for free and granting the Rockets a chance at the win. They blew that chance, ceding a 3-on-2 fastbreak that the Wolves failed to score on, thanks to a tremendous shot-block by a bloodied Sengun.
2026-03-27 01:07:07
Recently on the subway I observed a phenomenon in person that I had previously only seen on the internet. Two teenage girls sitting across from me were talking to each other. They were both dressed in the teenage-girl uniform—loose-fitting jeans, cropped black jacket, white sneakers—and they were idly tapping their phones as they chatted. That is not the phenomenon I'm talking about. I couldn't look away because one of them was speaking in what I have labeled Lip Filler Accent.
Lip Filler Accent is a noticeable pursing of the lips that creates more open space between the teeth and lips, constraining the shapes vowels take and compressing the sound. I call it Lip Filler Accent because I associate it primarily with online content creators who have had filler, but I think Botox injected around the mouth to smooth out smile lines can contribute to it as well, because Botox essentially freezes the muscles around the mouth, restricting expansion.
To be clear, I am making a few assumptions about this teenage girl: I am assuming that she adopted this style of speech, because of the way she was pushing her lips out while she spoke; I'm assuming that she had not received filler, because children under 18 generally are not allowed to receive cosmetic procedures like this. Which, if I'm right, would mean something even more fascinating is happening: Not only is Lip Filler Accent a thing, but people without lip filler are now mimicking it, either intentionally or not, online and in their real lives.
2026-03-26 23:07:04
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
The year 1996 marked a major shift in music. An era-defining rap beef seemed to pit the entire city of Los Angeles against the entire city of New York. Rap as a whole saw its position in the industry skyrocket, as its biggest artists were becoming true pop stars, a phenomenon lead by Bad Boy Records and a certain producer who had completely overtaken rap radio. Even the genre's regional scenes, like in Atlanta and Houston, were blowing up and opening the door to even more overlooked markets to break through. Elsewhere, the boy-band movement was getting revved up in Florida. Alternative rock, which had exploded with bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains, was running on fumes—concerns over which heaped pressure on Pavement, fresh off 1995's Wowee Zowee (still their best album, idc), whom legions of unkempt white guys hoped would become the next big thing for the MTV Generation. Rock would soon undergo its own change to close out the '90s, getting more aggro, more hyper-masculine, more hip hop; this was in part a response by the labels to the changing landscape of popular music, and also a reflection that rock's rising stars were just as influenced by Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan as by Metallica and Led Zeppelin.
