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There are many reasons why the Seattle Seahawks comfortably dispatched the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The Seahawks offense, led by Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III, was able to do enough against a very game Pats defense to never feel pressured into taking any major risks. After a turnover-free Super Bowl, Seattle finished with zero playoff giveaways, an incredible feat. Seahawks punter Michael Dickson was a machine when the offense did get stopped, putting three punts inside the 20 yard line, two of them within the five. Kicker Jason Myers was flawless, hitting five field goals and two extra points right down the middle. After a beating that thorough, you might imagine that it would be hard to point to one specific factor that really swung the game in Seattle's direction. But in this case, the culprit was obvious: the Battle of Cannae–style L the Pats' offensive line suffered. https://twitter.com/NFLBrasil/status/2020649033480441893

The Super Bowl halftime show is a giant, overstuffed program that is about celebrating its own overstuffedness. It's a maximalist entertainment spectacle set in the middle of the most maximalist entertainment spectacle in sports, where football is stretched out over five hours in order to show people commercials where society's most famous people hawk society's worst products. Thus it makes sense that halftime performance duties are usually bestowed upon the biggest pop stars of the moment, though assigning that title has become more difficult in our fractured and fractious culture. What made Sunday's event so interesting is that, for the first time in a couple of years, there actually was no doubt that the Super Bowl halftime show was performed by the biggest pop star in the world. Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and all-around superstar, has become the biggest artist in a global cultural zeitgeist no longer dominated exclusively by English-language music. He is extremely popular all over the world, including right here in the U.S., a country traditionally dismissive of artists that don't conform to a straitjacketed idea of "Americanness." The strain of all these tensions was evident the moment Bad Bunny was first announced as this year's performer. The usual suspects in the culture war pounced on the choice, accusing the NFL of the capital crime of felony wokeness, robbing these true patriots of the chance to celebrate "real America." This reaction was best encapsulated in two things: firstly, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson wondering aloud why the NFL couldn't have settled instead on a performer like Lee Greenwood, the octogenarian singer best known for 1984's "God Bless the USA"; and secondly, the decision by Turning Point USA, the right-wing dumbass debate club, to program an alternative halftime show headlined led by spiritually octogenarian rapper-turned-country-artist-turned-MAGA-mascot Kid Rock. Not exactly finger-on-the-pulse stuff. Meanwhile the NFL was itself stuck in its own cycle of nostalgia, opening Super Bowl 60 with multiple renditions of the national anthem and a Green Day performance of "American Idiot," to remind us, even in protest, that we are trapped in the Bush era redux. But for all the contrived controversy over the presumed America-bashing act of singing in Spanish, Bad Bunny's night was one of celebration. It was a culmination of his ascendence as the biggest star of his generation. He turned the 49ers' field, previously the site of what had been an almost unwatchably bad half of football, into a fantasia of Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture, traversing between sugar cane fields, storefronts based on real businesses like LA's Villa's Tacos and NYC's Caribbean Social Club, men playing dominos and women at nail salons. Through elaborate stage design and intense choreography, the performance presented a people's history of the Caribbean, with both intellectual rigor and visceral, joyful exuberance.

Nobody else in my house likes football, and we are believers in democracy at least as far as concerns the television. And so it was that, Sunday evening, I had the Super Bowl streaming on my li'l laptop screen, and the gigantic TV was showing a tape-delayed CNBC broadcast of mixed doubles curling at the Milano Cortina Olympics. I feel (but do not really have) a professional obligation to watch the NFL conference championships and Super Bowl, but an odd pattern developed at some point in the first quarter: The curling was stealing my attention away. It started in the commercial breaks, when I'd mute the stream to avoid the ads and the curling would catch my eye, and I'd miss a couple minutes of the game before I remembered I was trying to watch it and not tape-delayed curling. But there were so incredibly many commercial breaks, because the teams kept going three-and-out. The curling (thrilling, dramatic, from 12 hours in the past) would distract me for two minutes beyond the end of one commercial break, and I'd go "Oh shit, I'm missing the game!" and I'd pull the stream back up on my laptop and NBC would already be breaking for commercials again. And the curling (nerds with brooms having a sweeping contest) would sink its fiendish teeth back into my feeble attention span. Americans Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin were going against Swedish siblings Isabella and Rasmus Wranå. The Swedish sister, Isabella, was wearing huge boxy eyeglasses and looked like an 8-year-old and was impossibly adorable; Dropkin, in turn, is far handsomer than curling calls for. The pairs' playing styles seemed to contrast: The Swedes would ease their stone slowly and delicately down the lane, playing for maximum precision and placement, and then Dropkin would send a stone rocketing along at freeway speeds and blast the Swedes' stones to hell. This struck me as an extremely apt representation of the respective nations' bearings in the world today, which, combined with Isabella's glasses, made it pretty much impossible to root for the Americans.

Will Lewis, the stubbled bumbler brought in by Jeff Bezos to lay waste to the Washington Post, is gone. Lewis announced over the weekend that he was resigning as the newspaper’s CEO and publisher. But mission accomplished! Not since King George III razed the White House has a Brit so fucked up our nation’s capital.  “[N]ow is the right time for me to step aside,” read Lewis’s note to his workforce, a much smaller sample group than when he came on the job in late 2023. Lewis flees the Post the same week that executive editor Matt Murray disclosed that 300 or so employees, estimated to be a third of the staff, were canned. The sports and books sections were euthanized, and local and international reporting desks were severely gutted. Previous moves had already left the opinion page without rationality. (This dumbass editorial on Billie Eilish at the Grammys captures the sad state of Post commentary.) There really is no clear path forward for the Post to maintain relevancy even in its home market, let alone recapturing past glories. But what glories they were!

The history of professional football is long and strange enough to include a placekicker or two who had "a normal career." Theoretically. I have found scant evidence of that, but presumably there has been or could be a kicker that performed as a pro more or less in the way that their college career and draft position indicated they would, and was consistent about it year after and year over year. Stranger things have happened. Or, anyway, all kinds of strange things happen. Given the fine NFL career that he's put together over the last 11 years, it made sense that Jason Myers converted all five of his field goal attempts in Seattle's Super Bowl win on Sunday, setting a Super Bowl record. It seems wrong in some deep but ultimately inconsequential way that doing so nudged him ahead of LaDainian Tomlinson's greatest season—2006, when he set a league record for rushing touchdowns with 28—to make Myers' 2025 campaign the highest individual scoring season in NFL history, but given how kickers are and what kickers do, that is not really all that strange either. The player that Tomlinson passed to set that rushing touchdown record was Shaun Alexander, who was taken two picks after the Raiders selected kicker Sebastian Janikowski with the 17th pick of the first round back in 2000. Alexander won an MVP, but was done in the NFL by 2008; Janikowski kicked for 18 seasons and retired at the age of 40, after having beaten out, huh, Jason Myers for Seattle's placekicking gig. (Myers caught on with the Jets that year, made the Pro Bowl, and signed a free-agent deal with Seattle in 2019.) What does this mean? Nothing much, really. It was absolutely deranged, even by that organization's standards, for the Raiders to select a kicker with the 17th pick of the NFL draft, but even a comparatively busted kicking phenom can still wind up with a long and accomplished career, especially relative to someone whose job involves getting tackled 40 times per game. More than that, though, no one really seems to understand how kicking or kickers work, even still, or how to value the people that do it. A kicker like Cam Little, whose unprecedented range more or less upended the sport in his team's favor last season, was still available in the sixth round of the draft in 2024. Brandon Aubrey never kicked a football in a game during his four years at Notre Dame, didn't make his NFL debut until he was 28, and has been All-Pro in every season since. Justin Tucker, probably the greatest kicker of his era, went undrafted after a stellar college career at Texas and was later revealed to be a serial sex creep.

To ski jump is to momentarily become a god. The track is narrow and slick, and the athletes plummet down the sloped hill at almost 60 mph. They leave the track and take up, up, up into the sky, where they bend themselves forward. Their chests are almost at their skis, which they hold perfectly still, angled outward as they soar through the dark skies of Cortina like a bird of prey. They are so still, so serene as they glide through the air toward the bright green line of success. It is astonishing and mesmerizing to watch them. But just imagine how much more beauty, splendor, and excitement men's Olympic ski jumping could have if all of the men had bigger dicks. In January, Kristina Ellwanger wrote in the German newspaper Bild that a new scandal was rocking the world of ski jumping: ein Penis-Gate. Because ski jumping is often determined by the thinnest of margins, athletes, she wrote, had found a new way to give themselves an advantage. They are allegedly pumping up their dicks with hyaluronic acid fillers.

Break the ice with our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Stock and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a freelance puzzle maker and newly minted stay-at-home dad originally from Dallas. His puzzles have been published in the New York Times, USA Today, and the New Yorker, among other venues. When he’s not making puzzles, Matthew enjoys cooking, birdwatching and playing ultimate frisbee. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.

"The future of media is AI!" That's what Devin The Mixed-Reality Dugong has been telling me every single day, ever since he stopped talking about the metaverse. I'm certainly in no position to argue with him. In Devin's role as Chief AI/Metaverse/Surveillance Officer for Defector, he has pioneered such thinkovative ideas as the algorithmically generated sandwich, the metaverse T-shirt, and the Defector Electronic Virtual Information Network (D.E.V.I.N.). We'd be hidebound Luddites not to use the full force of Defector's global reach to publicize these groundbreaking efforts to disrupt the blogging space. And what better stage than the biggest television event of the year? Per Devin—whom I am paraphrasing because he has the standard Chief AI/Metaverse/Surveillance Officer clause in his contract that he does not have to read or write anything—this TV spot went out during the Super Bowl on Sunday to select markets disproportionately populated by AI power users. If you didn't get it in your area, you're probably not enough of a free thinker, but you're about to get your mind blown. While plenty of AI pretenders flooded the zone with their own commercials during the broadcast, this particular ad stands above all the rest as the kind of world-changing moment that you will never forget.

I can't speak for every neutral, but I think for a lot of us, the experience of watching the Super Bowl was sitting around and willing Drake Maye to do something for the New England Patriots—not because we wanted the Pats to win, but because the game was extremely boring. By the end of the third quarter, I was totally tuned out. I couldn't even tell you firsthand what happened in the last 15 minutes. But reading about what developed near the game's conclusion, it appears Maye came alive. His performance in the fourth was literally unprecedented, with his 235 passing yards setting a new record for the most in one Super Bowl quarter. That's amazing! When I was paying attention, it sure looked like Seattle was eating him for breakfast, brunch, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner, and late-night treat. But as soon as I looked away, I guess he turned into the second coming of Joe Montana. I apologize for this oversight in the line of duty, but since I didn't bear witness to such a peerless performance, I asked my editor to cut together the key plays of Maye's fourth quarter. We're on a tight deadline, so it's going into this piece after I turn in the draft. But I'm sure it's filled with the kind of competent, sure-handed signal-calling that led the Patriots all the way through such a challenging path to the AFC title.

Giannis Antetokounmpo has purchased some shares of the prediction market platform Kalshi. Kalshi, which would prefer to be described as a market-based "filter" on the otherwise unreliable flow of human knowledge but is in fact just a way for normies to lose money wagering on elections and hurricanes, is a private company. You would have no reason for knowing about Antetokounmpo's shares in Kalshi, except that he is determined that you should: The superstar of the Milwaukee Bucks announced his investment to his more than 3 million Twitter followers Friday afternoon. The statement was crafted to sound like the connected thoughts of an intelligent being, but in fact is gibberish: Everyone is online. The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own. Today, I'm joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now. Leaving aside the question of whether a person "makes" an opinion, it's grimly funny how Antetokounmpo's statement seems in no way relevant to Kalshi's business. Prediction markets are concerned with whether an event will or will not take place, and the trades they facilitate are resolved as binaries, not subject to—or certainly not intended to be subject to—interpretation or point of view. It's the entire basis of the evangelizing of Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, who is eager for prospective users and investors to think of his product as an infallible record of facts in an otherwise mad world. While that is for sure some shit you say aloud after you have been on drugs for a while, and should not be taken very seriously, its deranged overstatement at least underlines a very key selling point of a functioning prediction market: This is not the opinion shop, this is the fact shop.