2025-12-23 03:19:11
The Detroit Pistons are the toast of the NBA (positive), two short years after being made into toast by the NBA. Not only are they on top of the Eastern Conference with the fifth-best net rating in the league, they are extremely fun and cool to watch. This week, we brought on Pistons expert and returning champion NBR guest Maitreyi Anantharaman to talk Pistons, as well as the WNBA labor battle. She will be familiar to listeners and readers, though I must once again recommend her recent story on Ken Belson's book and the state of sports labor.
2025-12-23 02:30:24
One of the less invoked but still annoying features of following sports is the idea that the future can be foretold based on a typically stunted review of the recent past. For the Kansas City Chiefs, it had been a debate among our louder pundit-o-blatherers about the state of their dynasty—specifically whether their bay window of glory had been reduced to a peephole.
Then the gods weighed in with the answer, with the subtlety of a sash window being slammed down on Andy Reid's tongue. And yes, we cleaned up that image in deference to the season.
2025-12-23 02:12:17
Jake Paul has been begging to get his teeth knocked in for a long time. Anthony Joshua finally did just that to the boxing gadfly in the sixth round of Friday’s fiasco of a fight from Miami.
Actually, along with breaking a jaw and ending the bout, Joshua’s massive overhand right might have saved two careers. Before it landed, both he and Paul had spent the night damaging themselves reputationally to the point that their ring runs were likely on the ropes.
2025-12-23 01:43:26
Can you ask someone to “close your eyes and watch” something? Just how private does a conversation need to be in order to upgrade from speaking “privately” to “very privately”? What does it mean for a wild pigeon to be “essentially on life support”? These are some of the many conceptual riddles posed by the contenders for Defector’s annual prize for bizarre sentences in journalism. It’s time to announce the 2025 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many.
In this year's crop, there are uncharacteristically artless sentences by otherwise capable writers, and characteristically jacked-up sentences by perennial Shamsy contenders, people and outlets steadfastly committed to obscurantism and bluster. Today I hope to honor all those heroes for their humanity, because I spent much of this year wondering whether humans would even be dealing with written language for that much longer. It had a pretty good run.
2025-12-23 01:25:20
The North Carolina Tar Heels, fresh off the cataclysmic first season of the Bill Belichick era, have decided that what this program really needs is more notable old horndogs who used to be great at coaching football. In that spirit, the school has turned to Bobby Petrino.
Petrino is expected to be the new offensive coordinator for Belichick's Tar Heels, according to reports from ESPN and On3. This comes after the firing of Freddie Kitchens and other lackeys Belichick has thrown under the bus, to make it seem like he is planning to change things around. Petrino spent most of the past season as interim head coach for Arkansas, a return to glory after his infamous horndoggery-related 2012 firing from the school. The glory was short-lived, though, as the team went winless the rest of the season.
2025-12-23 00:35:27
Bari Weiss, the little smirking suck-up that is presently editor-in-chief of CBS News, intervened at the last minute Sunday to spike a completed story, titled "Inside CECOT," that was scheduled to air on that evening's edition of 60 Minutes. The story, exposing conditions at El Salvador's hellish Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison, had been advertised and promoted by CBS over the preceding days. The story's lead reporter, veteran correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, said Sunday night that the story had been fact-checked, had gone through five internal screenings, and had been cleared by the company's attorneys. Weiss, in a pretty severe and dramatic move, overruled the company's checks and unilaterally determined that the story "needed additional reporting," as communicated by a company spokesperson.
This morning, while mewing her way through a call with CBS News staffers, Weiss explained her rationale. According to several reporters who were fed Weiss's comments pretty much as they were being made, she held up the story for several reasons. By her estimation, the 60 Minutes segment didn't "advance the ball" with new revelations: Weiss pointed out to her employees that The New York Times has also reported on the human-rights abuses occurring at CECOT, which apparently renders any reporting CBS News wants to do on the topic inessential. Weiss also said during the call that the story was lacking because it did not get "the principals on the record and on camera."
