2026-03-18 04:32:19
For a seventh straight night, the WNBA and players' union left an all-day collective bargaining session Monday without a deal in place. The two sides have spent around 90 hours in in-person meetings since last Tuesday. Union president Nneka Ogwumike told reporters this past weekend that the big issue to resolve remains revenue sharing, namely how to divide the huge sums of money coming into the league from a new $2.2 billion media rights deal, an ongoing slate of expansion, and growing corporate sponsorship interest. Players have consistently sought a salary system tied to gross league revenue, akin to the NBA’s, which grants players 51 percent of all “basketball-related income.” The league’s proposals, meanwhile, have only offered players a share of “net revenue,” revenue after expenses.
On Monday afternoon, I spoke with Tamika Tremaglio, who was an advisor to the WNBPA during the 2020 collective bargaining agreement negotiations and later served as executive director of the National Basketball Players Association from 2021 to 2023, leading the negotiation of their seven-year CBA finalized in 2023. We discussed the origins of today’s revenue-sharing fight, the role public opinion plays in labor negotiations, the value of all-day bargaining sessions, and the quirky accounting practices common in sports. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
2026-03-18 02:46:36
Raw power is winning out these days. While one of the great pleasures of the sport is watching the intersection of sharply contrasting styles of play, I have temporarily set aside all those nuances. The main matchup I want to watch right now involves two players with almost identical agendas: Hit the winner at the soonest opportunity. We're not here for the drawn-out rallies and defensive maneuvering, but the simple race to land a lethal strike. In the 16th installment of this rivalry, Aryna Sabalenka fended off one Elena Rybakina match point in the deciding tiebreak, and went on to claim her first-ever title at Indian Wells.
There was plenty of narrative baggage for Sabalenka heading into Sunday's final. Despite being unambiguously the best player on the tour for a while now—she's now held the No. 1 ranking for 81 consecutive weeks, and she is the most consistent performer at the majors—her title haul doesn't quite live up to her reputation. From the start of the 2025 season up to the 2026 Indian Wells final, Sabalenka had played in 11 finals and won just five of them. Two of those losses were weighty ones delivered by Rybakina, who won at the 2025 WTA Finals (one-way traffic) and at the 2026 Australian Open final (constant momentum swings). Rybakina has also been the best player in the world when pitted against top-10 players, having won 12 such matches in a row, a level of invulnerability versus the elite that Sabalenka hadn't managed to reach despite her stranglehold on the No. 1 ranking.
Even at its best, Sabalenka's tennis is a volatile compound. Self-implosion is always on the menu. World-beating tennis and abject misery are separated by perhaps two ill-timed unforced errors. Sabalenka has point-ending power, some of the best the WTA has ever seen, but she rather vividly illustrates that this can also be a curse: The onus is almost always on her to finish the rally. Her matchup against Coco Gauff makes this dynamic especially clear, as Gauff sets up her defensive forcefield and asks Sabalenka to hit one more ball, over and over, until the little grain of doubt sets into Sabalenka's mind and unravels her technique. That's when the match reduces to Sabalenka spraying errors on her forehand and periodically slapping herself on the forehead.
2026-03-18 02:35:06
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking music books, living on the moon, the NCAAs, and more.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! I’ll always remember when I called it St. Patty’s Day online and everyone yelled at me that it’s “St. Paddy’s Day,” not “Patty’s.” I despise the Irish now.
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2026-03-18 01:00:23
Half an hour into the Nitehawk Workers Union’s winter rally, 50 or so people had gathered across the street from the Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater to chant, hold signs, and shiver on a Friday too cold for the season. Most of them were your usual labor supporters—members of the UAW and Teamsters Local 804 were there, as was Congressional candidate Brad Lander. But during one early speech, a man ran across the street and nervously asked me what was going on. After explaining that they were service workers at the theater, rallying for better conditions, he looked crestfallen. “I go there for the movies,” he said. “I didn’t know that anything was wrong.”
Nitehawk is an independent theater in a tony section of Brooklyn, the kind of cinema that screens both Hoppers and a series devoted to the works of women cinematographers. It also operates on the full-service food model: You sit down, place an order on a piece of paper, and, as you take in the film, a fried chicken sandwich and a drink appear at the personal table attached to your seat, brought by a server moving as silently and swiftly as possible. “As the business model goes, it’s a logical extension of what movie theaters have always done, which is make the majority of their money off of concessions,” said Ben Sepinuck, a member of the Nitehawk Workers Union organizing committee. And it makes some intuitive sense for an industry clamoring to get people in the theater: Sure, you can stream Frankenstein at home, but can you enjoy it while in a lay-back chair with popcorn and cocktails on demand?
Nitehawk workers began organizing at the Prospect Park location in the summer of 2023 (its sister location, a few neighborhoods away, isn’t unionized). “A lot of restaurants in Brooklyn were unionizing at the time,” Sepinuck said, and workers saw themselves in the larger labor movement in the service industry. Like in a restaurant, the servers at theaters like Nitehawk are responsible for greeting guests, taking orders, running food, and collecting checks. But unlike at a restaurant, they have to do this around an experience guests don’t want interrupted.
2026-03-18 00:26:31
At a glance, the Japanese water scavenger beetle Regimbartia attenuata looks like any other beetle. It is small, black, and pleasantly round. It has your standard set of beetle legs (six) and is otherwise unassuming. It is, you might imagine, the exact kind of bug that a frog would seek as a snack. But this water scavenger beetle is impervious to trials and tribulations that would kill any other insect. For one, it can pass through one end of a frog and emerge, utterly unscathed, out the other end.
Shinji Sugiura, an ecologist at Kobe University, first learned of the beetle's abilities while investigating how insects defend themselves against frogs. He collected a variety of insects found in a frog-filled paddy field and fed them to his amphibians in the lab. When a frog ate any other species of beetle, it defecated the insect, several days later, as a carcass. This was perhaps to be expected. But the water scavenger beetle had other plans. If the beetle is swallowed by a frog, it can zoom on through the digestive system and be excreted within six minutes, alive and apparently none the worse for wear. Sugiura found that 90 percent of water scavenger beetles clawed their way out the frog's derrière alive, according to the 2020 paper he published in Current Biology.
As you enjoy footage of the following experience, please note the nonchalant nature of the beetle and the freaked-out vibe of the frog.
2026-03-18 00:02:34
It's always good when the NBA tells you when it plans to do something it has already decided to do. You can think of the NBA's all-but-announced expansion gambit as a hamster wheel. Not as a piece of exercise equipment for indentured rodentia, but as a consumer product—you get the wheel either because you already have a hamster or because you're going to purchase one in about 10 minutes, since you're already at the pet store (nobody really dabbles in rescue hamsters). Either way, it's not an impulse buy.
So it is with NBA commissioner and astigmatic cadaver impersonator Adam Silver's declaration that the NBA Board of Governors—that's BOG, as opposed to GOB (Gang Of Billionaires)—is going to meet next week on the topic of expansion, almost certainly to Seattle and Las Vegas. This raises some obvious questions, none more obvious than whether the league has enough talent to expand when it already has eight to ten teams currently doing everything they can to avoid winning. And the obvious answer to that obvious question is "What the hell does basketball have to do with the NBA's business?"
Expansion is one of the few topics that could get people's minds off the NBA's plethora of perceived shortcomings, because it is something new in a continent full of what's old. Or sort of new—everyone that pays attention to the league has known the two expansion cities involved for years without ever actually being told, proof that just because a league is secretive doesn't mean it can't still be transparent. Las Vegas will be the more expensive of the two franchises—think not of the $7-10 billion proposition quoted by insider sources (whoever they are), but likely well past $10 billion. This is only because Golden State is valued at $11 billion by Sportico, Forbes, and CNBC, the highest-ranking troika of organizations in the industry of pulling numbers out of thin air. Team ownership is a status game, and the competition between bored billionaires will be fierce enough to raise the price to one that would make a billionaire's heart rate quicken. Don't forget, after all, that Snoop Dogg once offered a billion to lead a consortium to buy the Ottawa Senators, for Christ's sake, currently ranked 29th of the 32 NHL franchises, an indication of the intoxicating nature of sports ownership even as the rest of the planet becomes a charnel house.
