NowLoop

The Columbus Blue Jackets play hockey like they're skating on some sort of ice treadmill: You see a lot of effort, but they don't actually go anywhere. This is a squad that always listens to those jamokes in the stands who yell Shooooot, playing a fast and loose style that has them both third in the league in shots taken and third in the league in shots allowed. If you want that aesthetic to win games, ideally you need both of two things: top-class finishers who convert more of their chances than the other team, and a steady goaltender to cover all the action in front of him. Right now, the Jackets don't have the skaters, and they don't really have the goaltending yet, so even though it might be tiring to play against them, they're one of the easier teams in the NHL to get a win against. These action-heavy games set Columbus apart as an especially entertaining cellar-dweller. The Blue Jackets, historically, are the least successful team in the NHL, and even after a quarter-century of existence they're still struggling to shake the expansion-franchise blues. For five years in a row, they've missed the playoffs. However, last season was by far the most promising. They padded their stats a bit with a high-scoring six-game win streak to close out the year, but under new head coach Dean Evason they showed some real moxie. There was no defense to speak of outside of the perpetually overworked Zach Werenski, but the forward group was populated by the kind of under-25s that signal a new dawn. Lottery picks Adam Fantilli and Kent Johnson combined with diamonds-in-the-rough Kirill Marchenko and Dmitri Voronkov to form a relatively dangerous attack that was actually pretty efficient with its opportunities. After some truly horrifying goal differentials in years prior, Columbus finished the season plus-five, piquing the curiosity of those who hadn't completely forgotten the franchise existed.

On Tuesday's edition of ESPN's First Take, Stephen A. Smith described a football game that could not have occurred in our earthly realm. "We saw Charlie Kirk catch eight receptions for 144 yards," he said. It's possible that Smith saw this in a vision, but "we" did not: The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025. Also, I don't think he ever had the 40 time to do something like that. https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mcczh6ix532b Perhaps deskmate Jeff Saturday somehow witnessed this performance too, because he nodded and said "Yeah." First Take host Shae Cornette interjected with a crucial correction: "Christian Kirk," the Houston Texans wide receiver who did post those exact numbers in Monday's wild-card win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, a game that Smith attended in person for ESPN. "I apologize. Oh my God. Christian Kirk," Smith replied.

Everyone knows there are 50 ways to leave your lover, but the 50 ways of introducing your boyfriend to your parents don’t get as much airtime. First impressions with a new partner are notoriously tricky and can be panic-inducing, but how long could you reasonably delay the meet between your parents and your new boo? Would you wait six months? Two years? What about the length of an undergraduate degree? Today’s tale features a friend-of-a-friend who decides not just to wait until the end of college to tell her parents about her boyfriend, but makes the choice to hard-launch her relationship while picking up her parents from the airport. While under normal conditions that life decision could fuel a whole episode on its own, in this case that is only the beginning. Would you be surprised to find our our friend-of-a-friend's mom decides to take her (loving?) revenge above and beyond? 

I have some unsurprising news: Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched a memecoin to combat antisemitism, and someone connected to the coin's launch appears to have executed a clean rug pull within an hour of its launch, making off with roughly $1 million, cratering the coin's value. Maybe they felt antisemitism had been solved? Adams first teased the project just before New Year's Eve, then this Monday announced the launch of NYC Token, which he said is "built to fight the rapid spread of antisemitism and anti-Americanism across this country and now in New York City." In a hype video, a cab driver asks Adams, "You got some of that NYC Token?" to which Adams replies, "We'll get you some, brother. This thing is about to take off like crazy." He explained further in a characteristically baffling interview with Fox Business, saying the proceeds from the token's sale would be divided equally between the aforementioned initiative, a scholarship fund for underprivileged communities, and crypto education for New York City youths. During the interview, Adams repeatedly referred to it as "block change" technology, complained about the California wealth tax issue, and leapt over the following logical gap: Let's look at the best use case of blockchain: Walmart. Walmart is using blockchain right now to deal with their tracking of food and tracking of the goods in their stores. It is transparent, anyone can see it, and when you look at this coin, our New York City Coin, the money that is generated from this coin, we're going to zero in on how do we stop this massive increase of antisemitism across our country and across the globe, really, and how do we deal with the increase in anti-Americanism?

The new era of CBS Evening News, under the editorial direction of Bari Weiss and featuring new anchor Tony Dokoupil, is off to a rough start. Weiss is meddling and pouting, Dokoupil is not ready for primetime, and the ratings are already slumping compared to last year's numbers. These guys need a win, badly. On Tuesday, they tried to get one by securing an exclusive interview with President Donald Trump at a Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich. Everyone knows the most effective way to interview a head of state is to stand on a factory floor with him and shout questions over the sound of cars being made, and so that's exactly what Dokoupil gave his viewers. The 12-minute conversation began with Dokoupil seemingly desperate to get Trump to commit to going to war with Iran, then, as is typical, moved into a lot of uninterrupted ranting by Trump. When Dokoupil attempted to bring up the struggling U.S. economy, Trump shut down his line of questioning by pointing out that his presidential election victory is the only reason the news anchor even got a promotion. "We had a dead country—you wouldn't have a job right now," Trump said. "If [Kamala Harris] got in, you probably wouldn't have a job right now. Your boss, who's an amazing guy, might be bust ... Let me just tell you, you wouldn't have this job. You wouldn't have this job, certainly whatever the hell they're paying you."

The 2023-24 Michigan Wolverines season was a campaign of maximalism. Not only because they went 15-0 and won the National Championship, but because they did so while packing a decade's worth of scandals into one year. If you wanted to learn everything about the sport, in all its contradictions and glory, you couldn't do better than focusing on that very season. The off-field (and, well, sort of on-field) highlight of course was the Connor Stalions spying scandal. Stalions was an attaché for the program who worked as a codebreaker, attending games of future Michigan opponents, filming their sidelines, then decoding their hand signals to figure out which plays they were calling. The Stalions affair had a rich texture: Stalions regarded his work for Michigan football as something of a holy crusade, he had a side hustle selling used vacuums, and he even wormed his way onto rival sidelines. It inspired some of the finest literary fiction and blogging this site has published. The story was also quickly contextualized as one rotten apple within a stinky barrel, thanks in part to coach Jim Harbaugh beginning the season suspended for recruiting violations. Zoom out, and you'd see a program that was winning because of cheating. Zoom in, and you'd see the specifics of Michigan neatly fitting alongside every other scandal and landmark season in the history of college football, the only conclusion being that this school was no different from any other elite Division I program. You'd see the real enemy: the NCAA.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is having a bad time. He opened the second half of Tuesday's home game against the Minnesota Timberwolves with a baseline spin into a tough contested layup over Julius Randle, and finished the play on the floor. Antetokounmpo, seated beneath the basket, formed up the double-thumbs-down gesture, raised it up over his head, and booed loudly. He was not booing the referees, who'd whistled Randle for a foul on the play; he was booing the fans. After Giannis was helped to his feet, he continued to boo his team's fans. He felt it was only fair: Those same Milwaukee unfaithful, after all, had booed the Bucks only minutes earlier. "Whenever I get booed, I boo back," Antetokounmpo explained after the game. "It won't change home or away." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNSlUzRndy8

It is hard to say what mood I need to be in to have the urge to put on The Disintegration Loops, because it is hard to say what mood they express. The same five- or 10-second loop, so obviously mournful and defeated, can sound at another another time—10 minutes later, or 10 years later—just as obviously inspiring or triumphant. They say that what you get from a piece of art depends on what you bring to it. There's maybe no better example. The Loops are as much an experiment as a composition. In 2001, the ambient artist William Basinski was attempting to digitize an old collection of audio tape loops he'd recorded decades earlier. During the transfer process, he saw that the magnetized tape was literally flaking off the reels—the integrity of the recording coming apart a little more each time it played. As he played them over and over again, he noticed something interesting happening with the audio itself: It was decaying, imperceptibly with each repetition, but obvious after several hundred, several thousand. The Disintegration Loops, four albums with individual tracks running as long as an hour, are no more than they promise. Each track is a single melody, a few seconds long, repeated ad nihilum. If you go into it expecting to hear the melody change, you will be disappointed. The decay is so slow and subtle that each repetition is seemingly identical. But as the track goes on and on, you gradually become aware of cracks and pops where there weren't before. Voices have faded. It echoes, as if from the bottom of a pit. The loop has become less a snatch of music than a memory of one. "I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said.

It's pretty remarkable to recall today, after the firing of Xabi Alonso and the uncertainty about the state of Real Madrid's star-studded project, that the club is only a year and a half removed from the absolute pinnacle. The 48-hour period between June 1 and June 3, 2024, when the team won the Champions League final and then announced that it had added to that championship group the best player in the sport, Kylian Mbappé, could credibly stand as the very apotheosis of what Real Madrid aspires to be. From those heights, it maybe shouldn't be so much of a surprise that the club had nowhere to go but down. If Real Madrid's fate since those days stands for anything, it's that nothing can be taken for granted in this sport, and that tomorrow is not promised to anybody, not even those who already appear to possess it. It's not the case that the Blancos' struggles in the Mbappé era were completely unforeseeable, and in fact the risks were obvious from the outset. A team is a delicate mix of synergies, partnerships, hierarchies, and personalities, and it was clear that the de facto exchange of Toni Kroos for Mbappé would fundamentally alter the balances the team had arrived at over the years, and not necessarily for the better. The biggest question for Madrid the day Mbappé signed was how exactly the team planned to incorporate the Frenchman's talents with those of his new superstar teammates, Vinícius and Jude Bellingham, since the three did not seem to be the most natural of fits. A year and a half later, Real is still struggling to figure that out. When Mbappé first arrived, the Blancos were led by the sport's most brilliant jigsaw solver, Carlo Ancelotti. But not even he could coax any sustainable connections between the trio itself and the mishmash collection of players behind them. When the club's patience ran out with the Italian, they turned to Alonso, the crown jewel of that offseason's coaching carousel, one of the most promising young managers in the game, a man seemingly ideally placed to succeed inside the game's most unforgiving crucible. Like the Mbappé signing, the Alonso hire felt like a coup, a dream. But like with the Mbappé signing, the club was not adequately prepared to make the most fanciful aspects of the Alonso dream a reality.

After limping into the playoffs, the Pittsburgh Steelers suffered another first-round loss. After months—years, really—of intense scrutiny of his job, head coach Mike Tomlin has decided to "step down" from the position he's held for 19 years. Like a cowboy at the end of a Western, he now walks off into that proverbial sunset. At least, that's the story being pushed out. Adam Schefter has reported that Tomlin himself informed the team Tuesday of his plans to step aside. This comes after Monday night's 30-6 loss to the Houston Texans, a game in which Pittsburgh's offense, led by the husk of Aaron Rodgers, was outscored by Houston's defense alone. The scoreline could've been even more lopsided had the Texans' offense been merely decent. Even still, this was yet another playoff game where the Steelers looked overmatched and overwhelmed. The team has not found a long-term solution at quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger's retirement in 2022, and, despite all the credit Tomlin gets for overachieving with deficient teams, has not won a playoff game since 2017. That a 42-year-old Rodgers, potentially on the cusp of retirement himself, gave them their best chance to do so speaks to the organization's issues. In the end, Tomlin has gotten out ahead of a problem that is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. The roster is old and poorly structured, they don't have a quarterback, and the fanbase had already turned on him, even if the locker room hadn't. Tomlin himself is no longer a spring chicken; once the youngest coach in the league when he first got to the job, the 53-year-old was the longest tenured coach in the league during his final season in Pittsburgh. He won a Super Bowl in his second year in charge in 2008, and got back to another one in 2010, but ends his career with an 8-12 playoff record, tying the longest active streak of playoff losses in a row.