2026-01-29 08:50:30
Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his diagnosis hit all of us hard, but Dan never lost his enthusiasm or his spirit. Some of…
2026-01-29 02:03:04
The Tour Down Under loves its kangaroo iconography. Any given cycling season only truly begins once everyone gets to see images of star riders holding little baby joeys, and the first WorldTour race of the season also features a kangaroo as its mascot (Oppy, per the TDU, "represents dedication, grit and an enduring passion for cycling"). The point is to play to the rest of the world's mild, smirking affection for kangaroos, in a mostly successful effort to show part of what makes Australia unique. Carlos Alcaraz will get a kangaroo tattoo if he wins the Australian Open! Everyone loves kangaroos!
All of which is to say that when one encounters the news that a pair of kangaroos rattled through the peloton and caused a crash at the Tour Down Under, it is fair to meet the news with more amusement than horror. However, this not a whimsical story. Roughly one-third of the way through the fifth and final stage of the race, two kangaroos leapt into the main pack. Video of the incident picks up shortly after it happened, with one large kangaroo shown writhing around then leaping through and out of the peloton.
2026-01-29 01:23:52
This isn't the finale we imagined for Season 9, but as 2025 and 2026 have illustrated, time will keep passing and things will keep changing, regardless of our little plans. Just like everyone else right now, we learned all the ways we can adapt when everything starts to get a little chaotic.
This week's episode is a little different from most. Instead of bringing you a new story, Rachelle and Se’era sat down to talk about what it's been like to work on the show over the course of the past year, and what it means to produce a podcast about gossip when it feels like the world is on fire. Fear not! We also came prepared with some morsels of gossip shared by listeners just to help sustain y’all through the break. See you this summer for Season 10!
2026-01-29 01:02:17
If Bill Belichick was willing to play to type today, he would rise in Uppermost Dudgeon—it's a suburb of Foxborough—and say he doesn't want to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at all, won't accept induction when it does come, and would attend the ceremony only for the privilege of telling everyone who worked to keep him out this time to eat a heaping bowl of death. Expert analysts call this "pulling a Schilling," but more on that in due time.
Of course he won't, though. He'll endure what The Athletic and everyone else in the incredulous-on-command media game described as "a snub" and pretend (poorly) to be gracious when he is elected, which will probably be next year. Too bad, too. Not because Belichick shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame, mind you; even the most benign of explanations doesn't cover the full 20-plus percent of voters who skipped him on any principle. But his temporary (for the moment) exclusion makes him the latest example of what we now know halls of fame to be at their essence: places in which sports grandees honor their friends and hosepipe their enemies. And Belichick, through cultivation and diligence and by being the contemptuous villain he chose to portray, has made far more enemies than friends over his nearly half-century in football.
The news that Belichick didn't get the required 40 votes (out of 50 electors) to gain inclusion came as quite the shock to many establishment football people, who should know that concepts like ethics and honor have nothing to do with football, or much of anything else these days. Baseball fans know this as the Bonds Effect, with one important caveat. Barry Bonds has only been suspected of being a steroid enthusiast and proven only to be aggressively impolite to nearly anyone he met in the job, while Belichick actually got caught cheating. This is hardly unique in the results-before-honor world of which we speak here, but despite the theory attributed to former Indianapolis Colts executive Bill Polian in Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham's reporting at ESPN (which Polian has since disclaimed) that Belichick should not be a first-ballot HOFer because of the brigandries of Spygate and DeflateGate, it is Belichick's devotion and even zeal in being the most unpleasant bastard in a profession full of them that ultimately won the day. Even the only semi-compelling and football-related reason not to vote for his inclusion—that Belichick was more or less an extra-sour Norv Turner without Tom Brady—would not have swayed many voters if his public personality hadn't been so much "a bag of coal dust scattered in your eyes."
2026-01-29 00:27:39
Every day, up and down the culture, unjust things are happening. Terrible things happen to good people, while some of the most vile people this country has ever produced blithely escape any accountability for their actions and go on cutting the line. It is all wrong, and if the wrongness of it is not necessarily new, it can feel crushing all the same.
Now turn that frown upside down: Bill Belichick was not elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. As Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported at ESPN, Belichick failed to receive the necessary 40 of 50 votes from the Selection Committee during their recent conclave. "Several sources who spoke with the coach over the weekend described Belichick as 'puzzled' and 'disappointed,'" the reporters wrote, adding that Belichick groused, "Six Super Bowls isn't enough?" to an associate, and believes that "politics kept him out." Delightful!
What we have here is a perfect fit between villain and consequences. Belichick has won more Super Bowls than any head coach in NFL history, and would have a fine case for admission just for his game-changing work as a defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells, where he won an additional two Super Bowls with the New York Giants. There is no real case for keeping him out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the argument that Van Natta and Wickersham attribute to Bill Polian—and which Polian disclaims while saying he can't remember to a certainty whether he voted for Belichick or not—which amounts to making Belichick wait a year as a sort of ad hoc penalty for the two cheating-related offenses he oversaw in New England, is funny if not remotely valid. It is the nature of Hall of Fame voting that stupid stuff happens for stupid reasons, and this can comfortably be filed under that heading. In that sense, while the Spygate and Deflategate offenses are real enough, it would also be perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the thing for a member of the committee to withhold a vote from Belichick just because of how he acted.
2026-01-28 22:02:34
Lindsey Graham has been on a mission from God. The senator from South Carolina said on Jan. 15 that he would take a spontaneous trip to Israel, less than a month after his visit to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Mike Huckabee to discuss the purported ceasefire in Gaza. This time Graham was here to lobby, as a man alone and a trusted friend, to make sure a devastating war came to Iran’s shores as soon as possible.
Initially, at least, Graham had reason to be optimistic. On Jan. 2, the president promised massive retaliation against Iran for the killing of protesters, but then backtracked, claiming at first that many of the protesters had simply died in a stampede rather than from being gunned down. The same week that he rebuked Iranian security forces, Trump had threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against protesters in Minneapolis, threatening to send the military to quell demonstrations against paramilitary officers who were themselves killing civilians. He then moved the goalposts again and said if there were mass executions of protesters, he would take action, but claimed he had stopped the mass executions (this was denied by Iran's prosecutor-general). To Graham’s chagrin, the fall of the Islamic Republic would not come that week.
Graham, who had posed with Trump and a "Make Iran Great Again" cap, ended up coming before the assembled press on Jan. 15, now only proverbially hat-in-hand, and spoke in an unusually dejected tone. "There are a lot of headlines out there that are, in my view, not accurate," the senator said. "President Trump’s resolve is not the question. The question is: When we do an operation like this, should it be bigger or smaller? I’m in the camp of bigger. Time will tell, and I’m hopeful and optimistic that the regime’s days are numbered."
