2026-01-13 06:19:34
When we last caught up with No. 12 LSU and declared them schedule merchants in for a rude awakening, the Tigers were reeling from an 0-2 start to SEC play and looking ahead to a game against undefeated No. 2 Texas, an even tougher opponent than the Kentucky and Vanderbilt teams that had already beaten them. Head coach Kim Mulkey had supplied a simple diagnosis: “We’re not tough enough,” she told reporters. But on Sunday, LSU’s band of athletic guards rediscovered the ways of Mulkeyball. In an ugly 70-65 home win, they handed the Longhorns their first loss of the season and also handed me the 10,000th loss of my blogging career.
Writing from a distance and in relative obscurity, I can at least suffer my defeat in peace. Not everyone is so lucky. For someone who decries newspapers, Mulkey has a remarkable faculty for remembering every single thing any journalist has ever written about her. Reed Darcey, the LSU women’s basketball beat writer at the New Orleans Advocate, pointed out after the Kentucky loss that LSU had yet to beat an SEC opponent ranked in the top 12 of the AP poll since Mulkey was hired in 2021. “They're now 0-8 in those games. Five losses to South Carolina, two to Texas and one to Kentucky,” he posted.
2026-01-13 03:33:02
On Sunday, U.S. Figure Skating announced its Olympic roster, which adhered, as is natural, to the top three performers at its national championships. The men's event saw the most upheaval from the anticipated roster, but not in a way that was particularly interesting for Olympic prospects: Ilia Malinin is still the prohibitive favorite to win everything, and no other American man is expected to contend seriously for a podium finish. By contrast, the expected Olympic roster in the women's event nailed their programs: 18-year-old Isabeau Levito, who enjoys an ice princess image on ice; and two serious contenders for the Olympic podium in 20-year-old Alysa Liu and and 26-year-old Amber Glenn.
Unlike Liu, known to the greater populace ever since she became the U.S. women's national champion and the country's women's figure skating savior at age 13, Glenn was not an immediate prodigy. (Whether being a prodigy is to anyone's benefit is highly debatable. Liu retired from figure skating after the 2022 Olympics, when she was only 16, though her story has had a happy continuation: She made a practically unheard of return to the highest level in 2024, and found out how to skate on her own terms. As Levito said of Liu in a press conference last week, "She keeps the hoes on their toes.") What Glenn does have over Liu, and much of the women's singles field, is the ability to nail a triple Axel.
In the recent post-quad era of women's figure skating—brought in by the banning of the Russian skating federation and a raise to the minimum age of participation at the senior level—the triple Axel is the massive technical differentiator. The Axel is one of the easiest jumps to recognize by a figure skating neophyte, as unlike all other jumps, the skater faces forward at take-off; this also makes it the toughest, as the Axel requires an extra half rotation. Correspondingly, the base value for a triple Axel sits at 8.00, compared to the double Axel's base value of 3.30. No other triple jump has a base value above 6.00.
2026-01-13 02:39:58
The early rounds of the FA Cup are supposed to be straightforward. While every lower-division team that faces Premier League opposition dreams of pulling off the unexpected, these matches tend to look more like Manchester City's 10-1 thrashing of League One side Exeter City on Saturday. The money and talent gap between divisions is just too ginormous for upsets to be much more than pipe dreams. The best one can usually hope for is something like Wrexham's win over Nottingham Forest on penalty kicks last Friday—a nice story, to be sure, but the Championship's ninth-placed team besting the EPL's 17th-placed team isn't exactly David killing Goliath.
But the thing about dreams is that sometimes they do come true, especially in a low-scoring sport like soccer, and especially especially in a single-leg knockout match. Just ask reigning FA Cup champions Crystal Palace, who went into Saturday's match against sixth-tier Macclesfield FC expecting to win comfortably, only to see its cup defense end in stunning fashion at the hands of a semi-professional side.
2026-01-13 02:03:44
The Western Conference's nexus of pain is in an unsurprising location: Sacramento. Let us consider three NBA teams whose seasons have been impinged upon by straying too close to The Beam, whether physically or psychically.
Houston is currently spiraling, losing three games in a row. As the halfway point of the season approaches, evidence for their would-be contenderhood—the double-big stuff with Amen Thompson flying around gives them an actual edge on the Thunder, and they have maybe the best wing depth in the NBA—is matched if not exceeded by the evidence for their possible fraudhood: rotten turnover differential, inability to make enough three-pointers, an offense that "looks like shit."
2026-01-13 01:10:53
What was your favorite moment from Sunday night's season premiere of Industry?
Was it the opening scene with its pounding New Order needledrop, and the unveiling of an all-grown-up Kiernan Shipka a.k.a. Sally Draper?
Was it guest stars Kal Penn and Max Minghella, with its plot line that immediately calls to mind The Social Network? Industry sure does love to remind you of the much better movies you could be watching instead.
2026-01-13 00:48:37
Who says Bari Weiss doesn't know how to run a newsroom? "My general view here," the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador's CECOT concentration camp, "is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here." Expediency, personal prerogative, servility to power, all smuggled under the cover of journalistic scruple: Shit yeah, she's a masthead editor all right.
The truth is that prestige journalism is lousy with Bari Weisses, up and down the line. Ask any journalist trying to cover the genocide in Gaza or the social death of gender nonconformists. Ask any reporter who has spent time in one corner or another of the racism beat. Ask Ismail Ibrahim or Felicia Sonmez or Sandhya Dirks. Right this moment, in newsrooms all across the country, there are untold Bari Weisses preaching the doctrines of high journalism while quietly going about the work of making the actual journalism suck. They are softening claims, torturing the prose within an inch of its life, deferring to the cops, abetting a fascist incursion, introducing epistemic uncertainty where there is none, publishing Dylan Byers. If challenged on any of it, they will protest that they are merely upholding a standard, assuming the proud, martyred air of some lone sentry at the parapets of our besieged profession, after which they'll do a panel with Andrew Schulz or something.
Over here we find one of our many Bari Weisses "attempting to eliminate bias" by sidelining a Black reporter from covering an antiracist uprising because of a pungently apposite tweet. Over there we see them convening an internal review that will cluck at a story for not adequately establishing that the Trump administration, which twice gained the White House on the promise of overturning the civil rights of some people, is actually "intent on overturning civil rights." They are the tone worriers, the stet unstetters, the high priests of the "critics say" clause. They are the bosses at the Washington Post who kept Sonmez, a survivor of sexual violence, from covering stories involving sexual assault because they worried about "the appearance of a conflict of interest."
