2025-03-19 23:57:33
Maybe you forgot about the Los Angeles Clippers. It's cool. It happens to me all the time. I think I did not remember them even once between Christmas and, uh, Sunday. If you'd asked me Tuesday afternoon to place the Clippers in the Western Conference standings without looking, I would've said, "Anywhere between third and ninth," and you would've asked me to be more specific, and I would've said, "Hmm, probably somewhere between fourth and eighth, but also maybe tenth." The West is like this, yes, but my brain has been conditioned over decades to mark all active knowledge of the Clippers as a waste product and to scrub it from short-term memory. It's not even that I expect them to be bad. I expect them just not to matter very much.
With Tuesday's performance, the Clippers made a compelling case for closer attention. They fell behind early at home to the buzzsaw Cleveland Cavaliers, scrambled back, and then spent the second half beating the hell out of one of the NBA's very best teams. The extremely convincing win puts the Clippers a season-best nine games over .500, and keeps them within a game of the rising Golden State Warriors, who currently occupy the conference's sixth seed, clear of the play-in. Lots can happen between now and the end of the regular season. The top eight teams in the West are really good. The seven teams below Oklahoma City in the standings are separated by just five games; a proud home-stand here, a swoon there, and anyone in there might conceivably snatch the second seed. Ask the Rockets, who held the second seed for 29 straight days and then plummeted to fifth, and now find themselves back in second. Or the Grizzlies, who rose to second in February and were there as recently as last week, and woke up this morning in fifth, with the Warriors, Clippers, and seventh-place Minnesota Timberwolves all fogging up their sideview mirrors. It'll be a desperate sprint from here.
2025-03-19 22:41:57
I’m watching The Gorge, a made-for-Apple movie that isn’t very good but will do the job on a lazy weekend morning. The story here is that there’s a gorge. It’s a very deep gorge, and its contents are so potentially dangerous that all of the world’s superpowers have deemed it necessary to entrust 24-hour surveillance of the gorge to … two people. Who are stationed on opposite sides of the gorge. One of those guards is professional idiot Miles Teller. The other is living Vermeer painting Anya Taylor-Joy. These two highly trained super soldiers aren’t allowed contact with one another from their respective watch tower positions. That would compromise the security of the gorge, and we can’t have that. We must protect this gorge.
However, thanks to tactical binoculars and a truly fantastical ability to write legible signs, our gorge-crossed lovers meet-cute at a distance and, in keeping with the spirit of tired romantic comedy, even manage to dance to the Ramones together before they both fall into the gorge. Once stuck down there, they must spend the rest of the movie killing knockoff Last of Us zombies while trapped in a knockoff Upside Down from Stranger Things. As I’ve told you, this isn’t a very good movie. And yet I have to stick with it from the opening scene, and do you know why? Because of the gun.
2025-03-19 20:58:26
On March 8, pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in his apartment building in New York by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Khalil, a green card holder who is married to a U.S. citizen, has been held in a detention facility in Jena, La. since his arrest despite not being charged with a crime. The White House has been brazenly honest about the fact that Khalil is not accused of breaking any laws, instead arguing that the administration has a right to deport Khalil because he "led activities aligned to Hamas."
Tuesday night, Khalil's attorney released a letter from Khalil that had been dictated from inside the Louisiana detention facility. Here is that letter:
2025-03-19 05:07:54
Perhaps there is someone out there who follows Michigan baseball player Mitch Voit on Twitter without keeping close tabs on the junior's on-field exploits. It's fun to imagine this hypothetical person opening the app this morning and seeing the following message from Voit:
I would like to apologize for my actions on third base yesterday. I made an immature decision in the heat of the moment. The gesture I made does not reflect my character, the household I was raised in, or the block M that I represent in any kind of way. I take full responsibility for what I did, and I am truly sorry to all those who I have negatively impacted by doing this.
2025-03-19 02:12:37
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg tried and failed to block an agreement between the Trump administration and El Salvador that would pay the Central American country $6 million to imprison hundreds of people who were living in America. To make the deal happen, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used most notoriously to justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The act, in theory, can only be deployed in the context of war, but the Trump administration is using it as a weapon for a peacetime immigration clampdown. By claiming that Venezuelan "gang members" are invading the U.S., the Trump administration is attempting to bypass standard legal protections to quickly deport any immigrant whom they decide to say is associated with a gang.
Boasberg's ruling came after the ACLU sued on behalf of five people facing imminent threat of deportation. Already, however, the administration was sending hundreds of people on a pair of flights to Central America. While Boasberg verbally ordered the planes to be turned around so those on them could have a chance to be heard in court, the Trump administration refused, and instead took the opportunity to gloat about defying the order.
2025-03-19 01:46:32
These days, everyone is always talking about the price of eggs. Well it’s time to stop that. Now is the time to talk about the price of blogs: For a limited time, new subscribers can try a month of Defector for just $0.98. That’s roughly the going rate for two Large, Grade A eggs! Is […]
