2026-05-01 01:06:35
When LIV Golf launched in 2022, many were skeptical that there was a viable commercial lane for a new professional golf tour, even if it was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's seemingly bottomless Public Investment Fund and driven by the definitely bottomless cynicism of contemporary global power politics. With the news on Wednesday that the Saudi PIF would no longer be funding LIV Golf after this season, we can probably go ahead and hand it to the skeptics. As a soft-power gambit channeled through the universal language of sports, LIV was a flop, but it wasn't a total failure. As a way to get some cheesy bribes into various pockets, it worked out fine.
The PGA Tour, which was stodgy and exploitative and had alienated some of its most prominent players, really was ripe for competition. But what LIV offered was instantly recognizable as something else: This was disruption, the already antique-feeling pejorative for what happens when unconscionable amounts of venture capital is blasted in the direction of something that already exists, to see if the pressure of all that money might somehow fracture it in a profitable way. The results of this particular gambit were inessential at best and stupendously wack at worst. LIV Golf's signature innovations on the form were that events were three days and 54 holes instead of four and 72, and that they would have the sort of corporate-event party vibe that ensured a Chainsmokers song would be audible during every one of those holes. It was always going to suck; the question, from the beginning, was whether that still mattered.
From its inception, LIV was a rich-guy nuisance lawsuit in the shape of a pro sports league. The vibes were appallingly wretched, even by the low expectations you might have for a collaboration between Phil Mickelson and Saudi Arabia. But the people pushing LIV—the most aggrieved current and former pro golfers; Donald Trump and his greasy inner circle of Bribe Guys; various sheikhs—were making a bigger bet. They proceeded as if all that money and influence would make the low quality of the actual product irrelevant. As with so many other things in the culture that could be described as Trumpy—lavishly gilded, obviously corrupt, all done on the fly and in the open and with a bunch of visibly rotting celebrities sucking around—it felt both obviously doomed and somehow inexorable.
2026-04-30 23:49:00
If you paid any attention to the NBA after the calendar flipped to 2026, you were inundated with feverish debates about how to solve the supposedly existential crisis facing the league: tanking. With a strong 2026 draft class awaiting them, the worst 10 teams in the league attempted to lose as many games as possible to maximize their draft lottery odds, resting their good players with fake injuries, pulling effective players from close games, and playing G-League–level guys 48 minutes.
While tanking is not new, it had never been this widespread. The worst teams in the league losing games heralded a crisis of legitimacy that the NBA resolved to correct. On Tuesday, ESPN's Shams Charania reported on the league's strategy to fix tanking: Move it around so a different class of team has an incentive to tank.
Per Charania, the NBA has held a bunch of meetings with the board of governors, the competition committee, and every GM in the NBA over the past few months to talk through the various proposals it leaked last month. The owners will vote on it in a month, though both the substance of Charania's reporting (which is that "key points of the framework have a majority of the support from teams") and the fact of its publication through the league's willing mouthpiece make it seem likely that the new changes will be adopted ahead of next season. So, what are they?
2026-04-30 23:28:16
There is nothing about the Montreal Canadiens in their current iteration that causes a person to stop thinking about the team when it was the league's vibranium standard, which was nearly five decades ago. These Canadiens have always seemed somehow not it, whatever the "it" happens to be, and part of it might just be that they, like the other six Canadian franchises in the National Hockey League, have combined for no Stanley Cups in 33 years. But the cavalier term "these Canadiens" are also not "these Canadiens," as in this year's version. This year's version is in fact giving a face wash to all those notions, starting with, "You are what your anthem says you are." They have been paired in the first round with the ultra-experienced Tampa Bay Lightning, who have been the league’s signature playoff franchise for the last decade, all coached to the same stubborn standard by Jon Cooper, intractable by nature and in deed, while the Canadiens' recent history has been essentially to not be a playoff team at all. Even this one, better, faster, and defensively stouter, seemed a year too young to make the required April noise.
And that's how being dead wrong in public works. The Habs won Game 5, 3-2, in a harrowing and taut struggle played largely in their end, and they won not by being cool and elegant and Franco-flashy but by winning the faceoffs and outhitting the larger and more playoff-built Bolts.
2026-04-30 21:59:11
Donald Trump has a hang-up about Pluto. As far back as 2019, his appointed NASA administrator was making noise about reclassifying it as a planet, a status it lost when in 2006 the International Astronomical Union created a new system of nomenclature for all those weird and wacky bodies hurtling around the sun. Pluto, long a staple of the Big Nine and a famous childhood acrostic, was now a "mere" dwarf planet.
Trump's back on his weird horse again, making noise about declaring Pluto a full-blown planet via executive order. This is not a thing that an executive order can do. This week, though, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman told a Senate committee hearing that he is “very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again.'" This is also not a thing NASA can do. The IAU does it.
Isaacman knows this, and reached for a barely plausible mechanism: He referenced research papers that NASA is currently working on, and said "we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion." I do not think Isaacman actually cares about Pluto's status. I think he is remarkably shameless about kissing Trump's ass in order to let NASA receive sufficient funding to get on with its actual work. He's very good at that particular bit of key-jangling.
2026-04-30 21:03:14
The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw it as a more spiritual story of alienation. Roeg initially wanted the main character, an extraterrestrial inventor, to be played by the 6-foot-9 sci-fi writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton, or Peter O’Toole, the beautiful manic adventurer of Lawrence of Arabia, before being persuaded to check out Cracked Actor, a tour documentary featuring a coked-out-of-his-gourd David Bowie. Through Bowie, Roeg transformed Tevis’s author surrogate into what Pauline Kael would call “a wilted stranger [who] can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood,” whose “lesbian-Christ-leering [and] forlorn, limp manner and chalky pallor are alluringly tainted.” In other words, he’s David Bowie as he was in 1976: Fashioning the character around the remnants of Bowie, the rock star from Mars of the Ziggy Stardust period, the film also shaped the zonked-out, esoteric magus Bowie of Station to Station and Low, which both use stills from the film for album covers.
When a pop star appears in a movie, they deepen the movie by bringing everything we already know about their star persona to the role. The movie also deepens them, by giving them a platform to develop what we already know about that star persona in a visual and narrative medium, and to leave a bigger impression as they seem to bestride the entire cultural landscape.
The stakes of each impression—which is also the term in digital marketing for when a potential customer sees an online advertisement—have never been higher, as margins shrink in the culture industry. To put across a persona—or, as the current media-bestriding pop star now has us calling it, an “Era”—stars employ ever-larger teams of creative directors, stylists, videographers, and assistants. They carry the hopes of ever more label executives, brand and agency partners, and potential collaborators, not to mention potential collaborators’ teams, labels, and brand and agency partners.
2026-04-30 03:27:00
The Los Angeles Angels, to the extent they are discussed at all, have mostly been shamed for having the last two best players in the game over the past decade and doing nothing of substance with either. This has in large part been because they have produced, acquired, and retained a scandalously low number of useful pitchers during that period, although their similar struggles to do that with position players other than Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani haven't helped much, either. They have tried in the determined, strange, deeply ineffective way that the Angels tend to try, signing mid-tier free agents who instantly break in one or more ways and, more recently, spending their entire 2021 draft class on pitchers, an unprecedented admission of need in any sport. The last true impact starting pitcher their system produced was either John Lackey, who spent less than half of his 15-year career with the team, or Chuck Finley, who won 200 games in his career but whose last year as an Angel was 1999.
There's a theme here, and that is that the Angels stink at pitcher discovery, development, acquisition, and nurturing. When the team found 17-year-old Jose Soriano in 2016, there was no great reason for optimism, less because of anything Soriano did well or poorly than because of which organization would be paying him to do it. Soriano made it to the bigs and flashed a high-powered and appealingly strange arsenal, but until late last month he was just another Angels pitcher like the 210 others in that decade's worth of work product. And no, that's not really meant as a compliment.
It may now be that even that level of bloom is off this one solitary rose, as Soriano was lit up for two homers and three runs in five innings by the ultramodest Chicago White Sox on Tuesday night. But the reason this matters, to the extent that it might, is that those three runs tripled Soriano's ERA from 0.24 to 0.84, and quadrupled his runs allowed on the year from one to four. And in case you're thinking he managed this as a spot starter, long reliever, or recent callup, you cynical swine, this came over seven starts, 42 2/3 innings, and 163 batters faced. Soriano, who pitches for the Angels, has been the best pitcher in baseball all season long—or at least he was until last night, when he was the 19th best.
