2025-12-08 02:23:14
In the end, Lando Norris held his nerve, and his lead. Three drivers came into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a chance to win the championship, but it was Norris who did exactly what he needed to: a podium would guarantee a championship win, and a podium he achieved. He beat four-time champion Max Verstappen by two points and his teammate Oscar Piastri by 13, and put 15 years of Red Bull and Mercedes domination in the ground to help herald in a a new era of racing. Not too shabby for a driver who people were beginning to write off a third of the way into the season.
Let's get the negativity out of the way. Despite the potential of a three-way championship battle and all the discourse about team orders, the race itself was, honestly, a bit of a dud. Like much of the year before Max Verstappen's abrupt ascension and McLaren's late-season self-sabotage, it was a primarily mathematical endeavor; the top three drivers in the championship qualified in the top three, and all Norris had to do was maintain his place. Bar a remarkable overtake by Piastri around the outside of Norris in the opening lap of the race, and some early pressure from the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, there was little tension across the race's 58 laps. There were no safety cars, no retirements, no tough strategy calls. Verstappen and Piastri, who was virtually running an entirely separate race, barely felt relevant to Norris's personal championship battle, which was intentionally more concerned with the final podium spot and Leclerc than any potential victory.
2025-12-08 00:54:15
The Indiana Hoosiers are the last undefeated team in college football, and will have the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff thanks to their 13-10 win over Ohio State in last night's Big Ten Championship Game. Anyone waiting for Indiana's dream season to end will have to wait a little longer.
Winning a conference title may not mean as much as it used to in the pre-playoff era, but try telling that to anyone associated with this team, which has only two conference titles in its entire history, the most recent coming in 1967. And 13-10 may not be the scoreline anyone wants to see in a matchup between the top two teams in the country, but try telling that to Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who won the game with the throw of the season and then gave an all-time great postgame interview.
2025-12-08 00:43:05
Figure skating is a fundamentally cruel sport. A full regular season or tournament structure gives top athletes a bulwark against variance. But a figure skater's biggest competition comes only every four years; over the course of a single year, they will, if they are fortunate, get six elite-level opportunities to prove what they can do. Factor in that program execution, especially for the quad-defined men's event, is inconsistent, and that skaters are fundamentally at the whims of a subjective judging panel, and the sport itself can start to feel like a cruel game of chance. Just take a glance at figure skating's visibly HTML-powered official scores site, and it's not difficult to find a men's free skate dogged by poor execution across the board. One mistake and, well, that's just unlucky. Wait for your next shot in a year or four.
So the absurdity of Ilia Malinin in this era of figure skating is not simply that he can perform elements that no one else can—a quad axel!—or string together a number of jumps that no one else can match—seven quads!—but that he is so technically gifted and so consistent that he appears immune to the terrible whims of chance that his competitors are subject to. The base difficulty of the programs is such that he doesn't need to nail every single one of his jumps to convincingly win over his next-closest competitors. Earlier this year, he squeezed seven quads into his U.S. Figure Skating Championships free skate, though he didn't skate it clean. But, hey, why not nail it too?
2025-12-07 23:36:33
Liverpool's horrible season got worse on two different fronts on Saturday. The day started with the Reds coughing up a 2-0 lead against relegation battler Leeds United, ultimately drawing 3–3 with yet another fragile performance. It ended with club icon Mo Salah absolutely torching his manager during an impromptu postgame press conference.
Salah has been on Liverpool's bench for the last three games, only earning a 45-minute cameo during a 1–1 draw against Sunderland. Standing in front of a gaggle of reporters, Salah said that he's been made a scapegoat by the club, that he no longer has a relationship with manager Arne Slot, and that his time at Liverpool may well be coming to an end this winter.
2025-12-06 03:57:33
I started going back to the 1970s last winter because I was convinced everything and everyone else was, too. This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal years of national self-harm by watching a bunch of movies in which Gene Hackman scowled and wore weird hats and drank what was very clearly some absolutely dogshit coffee out of paper cups was something close to the healthiest possible scenario. The idea, if there was an idea, was both to get attuned to the frequencies and manias of that particular low and dishonest decade in the hope that there might be some lessons there, and maybe also to remind myself that national moments of humiliation, failure, and loss come and go in the same ways that personal ones do.
That is, they pass. American history tells us that the problems that make all that trouble do not ever get resolved, let alone solved; we don't really do that here. This country loves its problems too much, or has just mistaken them for virtues so willfully and for so long that it can't imagine living without them; in the absence of a more representative politics, or maybe as a sort of satire of it, politics collapses into various ways to perform being upset. None of this is especially dignified, or remotely What You Want. All of it feels both like it is too dumb and unworkable to last, and like it is getting worse.
2025-12-06 03:39:57
On Friday, after an interminable procession of songs, skits, interviews, and speeches, including Donald Trump accepting a knock-off Peace Prize, FIFA's 2026 World Cup draw ceremony finally did the only thing anyone actually cared about. (If that sentence sounds somewhat familiar, there's a reason, and it's that FIFA has unfortunately settled on a bloated format for the draw, made only more bloated by the sheer Americanness of this edition.) With just over six months until the start of the tournament, and with six spots still left to be decided by various playoffs in March, the general skeleton of the first 48-team World Cup has been sorted out. Here it is:
