2026-04-10 22:50:15
Spaceflight is a lot like airplane travel in that the vast, vast majority of incidents happen on takeoff or landing. More things are happening; more things can go wrong. On liftoff and reentry, specifically, the pressure and heat are a crucible in which the flightworthiness of a spacecraft is violently tested. It's important to remember that this is why these preliminary Artemis missions exist: they are flight tests. But tonight's Earth return for Artemis II will be especially squeaky bum time, given what happened to Artemis I's heat shield.
After the uncrewed Artemis I splashed down safely in December 2022, NASA was surprised to discover significant damage to its heat shield, with big chunks missing:
2026-04-10 22:28:44
It is a degrading experience to try to purchase tickets to a hugely anticipated event, and nothing fits that description better than the World Cup. So you can imagine why fans who successfully navigated the labyrinth of presale codes and lotteries and came out of it with a premium ticket might be upset to discover that their money didn't actually buy what they thought it would.
A new report from The Athletic details a devious little switcheroo that FIFA seems to have played on fans who purchased Category 1 tickets for this summer's games. For weeks, Category 1 was the most expensive ticketing tier that fans could buy into, and many of them certainly did hoping that they would be assigned a seat in the lower bowl. The seating maps that FIFA released showed that Category 1 tickets could be allocated across a wide range of seats, but certainly gave the impression that it was possible to get one close to the field.
2026-04-10 21:04:23
Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job there are like a hundred thousand would-be writers, if not far more than that. Plenty of world-historically excellent writers have gone their whole adult lives without ever making a steady living off their writing; plenty of the best and hardest-working writers presently alive are not doing writing as their primary source of income, nor even as a regularly gainful supplement to their main job. If all else—pay, benefits, security, steadiness of work—were equal, the list of adults who would trade their existing career for a job in which their primary task was to write about things would have much of the human race on it.
This has been true for generations. Many people, when they hear someone say that they are a writer, go ahead and take for granted that what this actually means is "I'm unemployed" or, at best, "I am a substitute teacher." When young people tell their parents they want to study creative writing in college, or say that their career ambition is to be a writer, the words "BACKUP PLAN" flash in red neon in their parents' minds, accompanied by klaxon alarms. Any decent person who actually makes a living via writing will freely admit the crucial role that dumb luck has played in making that possible: either accidents of birth or accidents of opportunity have blessed them.
People write for free. People write things they will never show to another living soul, just for the sheer expressive fulfillment of writing them. People slave away at novels for years, for decades, with nothing but the faintest ludicrous hope that a professional editor might ever do more than glance at the manuscript before chucking it into the trash. People work full-time jobs, tend to their kids and pets, spend time with their partners, and then stay up all night writing Letterboxd movie reviews, because they have something inside of them that can come out no other way. People drive for Uber and Doordash, wait tables, substitute teach, for years and years, all for the flexibility to spend their free time pursuing opportunities to get paid a few cents a word for the thing they love doing the most in all the world. Forget about getting paid to write: People pay money to write, with neither hope nor intention of ever making their money back. People leap at opportunities to get paid in "exposure" for their writing. People send fully written articles to the Defector tips email inbox with notes like If you decide to run this, I don't care about getting paid, just make sure you don't use my real name in the byline or I'll get in trouble with the university where I work.
2026-04-10 03:34:33
Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season games something of a relief. It also makes it possible for us to get a little more creative with booking this podcast. When the baseball season is starting and the college basketball season is roaring towards its end, it's only natural that we would try to talk about it. When that isn't happening, it makes it a lot easier to have our buddy Ed Zitron back on to talk about the state of the AI bubble and tech psychosis more broadly. So we did.
And after a few stray thoughts on l'affaire Russini-Vrabel and the subsequent masterclass in crisis management, we got right to it. Ed got us caught up on how AI technology is being put to use in the disastrous Iran engagement, and how those tools differ from the janky public-facing offerings currently being put to work writing some of the wackest high-school essays ever submitted. We also discussed how difficult it is to tell which AI tools are better than others, and why Grok is nevertheless instantly identifiable as the unchallenged worst in the field. We considered the hell dimension of Grok users who complain about Grok on Reddit, delivered a cursory RIP for OpenAI's baffling Sora video technology, which Drew aptly dubbed "the Quibi of AI," and dove into the spectacularly upside-down business model of the big AI companies. Finally, we pondered the question of why OpenAI is trying to go public, given what the sort of paperwork involved in an IPO would reveal, and considered whether it's possible for a money-losing business to skip straight to meme-stock status. You probably won't be surprised to learn that Ed is not optimistic on that one.
2026-04-10 03:07:32
When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a "Land of Many Uses." This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service's management of the forestland covering over a third of the United States. Since its inception over a century ago, the agency has both overseen conservation efforts and managed resource extraction by private concerns, mostly timber companies. The USFS has proved a mostly capable steward, resisting private capital's siren song of destruction and subjugation. The most important few of the aforementioned many uses are recreation, science, and simple existence. The best thing you can do for a forest is observe it and keep it from incinerating.
All that careful balance is gone. The forest as we know it is the latest target of war from the Trump administration. Early last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a series of moves that amount to the dismantling of the USFS.
The first and most important change is that the headquarters of the agency will relocate by some 2,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, which not coincidentally is the nerve center of the anti–public lands movement in the U.S. Several of the most powerful figures in the war on public lands, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, and Gov. Spencer Cox, have based their efforts there; the 1980 Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement led by ranchers and oilmen to transfer control of Western public lands to state governments more amenable to their privatization and exploitation, began in the city. This mirrors Trump's first-term strategy with the Bureau of Land Management, which he turned over to extractivist crusader William Perry Pendley and briefly relocated alongside a Chevron corporate office in Colorado.
2026-04-10 02:13:14
Complaints that men’s tennis is too fast go back further than I do. “Aces, Aces…men’s tennis too fast for its own good,” reads the headline to a 1992 Associated Press story that, to help make its point, begins with a quote from Casablanca. “Well, you just have to guess where the ball is going to go and pray,” Carlos Moya said in 1998 after a befuddling U.S. Open semifinal loss to Mark Philippoussis and his huge serve. “Because even if you know where the ball is going, it’s not easy to put it back.” A 1994 AP story in the Salina Journal cited Dutch fans chanting “boring” as Pete Sampras served aces against their Richard Krajicek at the Davis Cup. (It worked; Krajicek won.) The Daily Mirror once nicknamed Sampras “Samprazzz,” since his matches at Wimbledon, even finals, tended to be so straightforwardly serve-centric. One article advocated for a return to wooden rackets. The Philadelphia News headline in advance of the 1994 Wimbledon final: “Sampras, Ivanisevic advance to (yawn) Wimbledon final.” The Star, postmatch: “Sampras sees off Ivanisevic in boring game,” under the much larger heading, “BIG SLEEP.” This piece came on a page whose left side was plastered with a variety of sex ads, numbers for anyone from “BORED WIFE” to “IN THE SHOWER” to “Susi & Mary” to—yikes—“18 Year Old Students.” Perhaps someone thought it appropriate to spice up an otherwise snoozy page.
Today, the movies are worse and the newspapers are endangered, but the tennis gripe should be the same. To read how Jim Courier described playing and losing to Sampras in the 1993 Wimbledon final—“If he starts hitting his second serve around 95 to 100 miles per hour, putting it in the corners, it's pretty unstoppable”—is to realize how most current ATP players worth their salt do the same thing. Players can hit forehands faster than some first serves. The current meta is power; the mindset is relentless aggression. Merely returning a serve won’t get you into a point if the return isn’t hard to attack, too.
Tall task! The best first serves these days paint the lines at high speeds, with motions that effectively disguise which corner the server is aiming at. On top of all that, the ATP is populated with returners who range from mediocre to miserable (Lorenzo Musetti, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton, go down the list). At the Miami Open, finalists Jannik Sinner and Jiri Lehecka had their serves broken a combined three times all tournament. (Sinner scored two of those breaks in the final.) The Indian Wells final between Sinner and Daniil Medvedev saw zero breaks of serve and only two break points. Carlos Alcaraz won the 2025 U.S. Open, seven matches, after being broken just three times (and once in his first five matches combined). Even in his most dominant Wimbledon runs, Sampras was never broken fewer than seven times. The tennis writer Matthew Willis has observed that on hard courts, Casper Ruud—whose serve is probably a candidate for the least-discussed shot on tour, somewhere up there with Andrey Rublev’s backhand or your brother’s forehand volley—is holding serve on hard courts lately at a higher rate than Sampras did in 1994. Willis also posted a graph of top-50 ATP players’ service hold rate, dating back to 1992; they’re now holding more often than at any other point in that span.
