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There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type “truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump” into your web browser to see if he actually said that. Once there, you can see a post in which Trump did indeed threaten to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, stacked on top of an ad for a sketchy herbal supplement of some sort:

There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type “truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump” into your web browser to see if he actually said that. Once there, you can see a post in which Trump did indeed threaten to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, stacked on top of an ad for a sketchy herbal supplement of some sort:

One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued throughout her time with the most lucrative professional sports league in North America. The discrimination included not having proper cold-weather gear for winter games, requests for how she wore her hair, and being told to “shut your fucking mouth.”

Exactly one year ago today, Real Madrid Femenino appeared to be on the precipice of a new era. After five years of institutional disinterest and mediocre results, Las Blancas had at last achieved a feat worthy of the club it had until then borne in name only. Back then, in the first leg of its Champions League quarterfinal, Madrid welcomed Arsenal onto its swampy pitch and upset the Gunners, 2-0. Madrid then one-upped itself the following weekend, outplaying and beating the mighty Barcelona for the first ever Blanca Clásico victory. Those two triumphs, easily the biggest wins in the club’s short history, were laudable in their own right, but were most important for the implicit promise within them: the idea that maybe, finally, Real Madrid was ready to cast off its self-imposed restraints and start the work of becoming the kind of team it could and should be. One year on, it’s now clear that, unfortunately though unsurprisingly, the club’s actual fate has not proven so inspirational.

Do you remember when Barbra Banda scored a goal on her birthday to tie up Orlando’s match against Denver? How about when Emma Sears ran the length of the pitch with the ball at her feet to put Louisville up 2-0 on Washington? Or when the Spirit came back to tie it up with a Sofia Cantore scorcher and a Leicy Santos snipe?

Tuning in for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Saturday night (Sunday afternoon in Melbourne), I was expecting many things. I was expecting Aston Martin to retire from the race early in order to avoid causing Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll physical harm. I was expecting a few other retirements from the race due to reliability issues and the jankiness of the new cars. I was expecting a George Russell win, and a comfortable one at that. All of those things came true, more or less. Hilariously, both Alonso and Stroll looked to be retiring only to come out miles behind to do some on-track testing; the graphics team surely had fun writing “+12 laps” there. Because I am a fool and a Ferrari fan, however, I did not foresee a vintage dose of Ferrari strategy shenanigans, which only made their traditional appearance on race day all the more demoralizing.

Iran’s participation in the U.S.-hosted 2026 World Cup promised to be an uncertain, contentious matter even before the U.S. and Israel started raining bombs on Iranian political leaders and schoolgirls alike. The American government had already denied visas to several members of the delegation Iran planned to send to the World Cup draw back in December, as part of a blanket travel ban on Iranian citizens that would’ve prevented the vast majority of Iranian fans from being able to attend this summer’s event. Another controversy arose soon after the draw, when Iranian and Egyptian officials raised a stink about a pre-planned LGBTQ Pride event in Seattle that the draw happened to schedule for a group-stage Iran-Egypt match. Naturally, those little points of friction, and the longstanding geopolitical tetchiness they reflected, came to a head in the form of the war that FIFA Peace Prize winner and known war criminal Donald Trump decided to wage on Iran. Iran’s now-official response was hardly unexpected.

In less than two weeks, a new season of the NWSL kicks off. If that causes you to do a double take—Didn’t Rose Lavelle just score the championship game-winner, like, last week?—you’re not alone. The championship match was followed immediately by a December full of the NWSL’s favorite pastime: controversy. In this case, it was a very public battle over the fate of Washington Spirit superstar Trinity Rodman. The free agent’s choice to remain with the Spirit, announced on Jan. 22, was no doubt the most followed storyline of the offseason and has enormous consequences for the league’s future roster-building and labor relations, but a player staying with her team doesn’t exactly shake up the league. Good thing general managers across the country were hard at work, wheeling and dealing to improve their clubs’ chances in the new season.

The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else’s subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else’s experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

A reverie about the WNBA through the lens of romance novels, such as Rooting Interest

In 2012, a self-published author of erotic Twilight fanfiction, whose books had gained a large fan base online, was offered a seven-figure contract by a major American publisher. E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would become the three bestselling titles of the 2010s in the U.S. (even Fifty Shades Freed, the now mostly…

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Each time Matthew Zipple, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University, releases a mouse that was born and raised in a laboratory into the green expanse of a field, he is amazed. He transports the mouse in a paper cup, lays the cup on its side in the grass, and takes off the lid. “When the…

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31485960

As Borras-Chavez and Sperou watched Nora guard her lifeless pup, they felt mixed emotions. “It’s being a scientist and a researcher and realizing that this is such a fascinating thing going on, and our curiosity just sparks,” Sperou said. “And then there’s the flip side of it, where it’s like we are humans, and we are seeing a mother carrying around her dead baby.” Or, as Borras-Chavez put it, “you weep a little bit.” The researchers abstained from flying drones or sampling the seals when they were with pups, dead or alive. “Our model is usually science-first,” Borras-Chavez said. “But if an action that we’re taking would have been disrespectful for us, if somebody else would do it, then we don’t do it.”

On Oct. 19, American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky was found dead in his Charlotte, N.C. home. He was a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and his death, which police say is being investigated as a possible overdose or suicide, has rocked the chess world. The U.S. Chess Championships held a moment of silence…

strongly recommend giving this one a read to the end

I'm pretty sure I'm not an "online" enough person to share in the author's experience of what appears to be an existential crisis brought on by an old Tiny Desk Concert, but it's an interesting article nonetheless. Idk, maybe it's cringe, but I liked "Home" when I first heard it, and I still like it now. Womp womp.

Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.

Money quote:

If you’re not a particular kind of mountain sports nerd, you might not be familiar with the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. But for people who live their lives in the overlapping circles of outdoor and adventure sports, environmental and conservation sciences, and nonfiction storytelling, it’s a touchstone. The parent festival has been […]

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The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper’s purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children’s entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might […]

If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.

If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.

If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.

The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper’s purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children’s entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might […]

How would you imagine the greatest individual season in NWSL history? Our hypothetical player would need to score a lot of goals, obviously. Breaking Sam Kerr’s single-season scoring record (18) would certainly get plenty of attention, so let’s put that at the top of the list. How about assists? Assists are important, too. Let’s say this player has … five of those. Five sounds good.