NowLoop

Half an hour into the Nitehawk Workers Union’s winter rally, 50 or so people had gathered across the street from the Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater to chant, hold signs, and shiver on a Friday too cold for the season. Most of them were your usual labor supporters—members of the UAW and Teamsters Local 804 were there, as was Congressional candidate Brad Lander. But during one early speech, a man ran across the street and nervously asked me what was going on. After explaining that they were service workers at the theater, rallying for better conditions, he looked crestfallen. “I go there for the movies,” he said. “I didn’t know that anything was wrong.” Nitehawk is an independent theater in a tony section of Brooklyn, the kind of cinema that screens both Hoppers and a series devoted to the works of women cinematographers. It also operates on the full-service food model: You sit down, place an order on a piece of paper, and, as you take in the film, a fried chicken sandwich and a drink appear at the personal table attached to your seat, brought by a server moving as silently and swiftly as possible. “As the business model goes, it’s a logical extension of what movie theaters have always done, which is make the majority of their money off of concessions,” said Ben Sepinuck, a member of the Nitehawk Workers Union organizing committee. And it makes some intuitive sense for an industry clamoring to get people in the theater: Sure, you can stream Frankenstein at home, but can you enjoy it while in a lay-back chair with popcorn and cocktails on demand? Nitehawk workers began organizing at the Prospect Park location in the summer of 2023 (its sister location, a few neighborhoods away, isn’t unionized). “A lot of restaurants in Brooklyn were unionizing at the time,” Sepinuck said, and workers saw themselves in the larger labor movement in the service industry. Like in a restaurant, the servers at theaters like Nitehawk are responsible for greeting guests, taking orders, running food, and collecting checks. But unlike at a restaurant, they have to do this around an experience guests don’t want interrupted.

At a glance, the Japanese water scavenger beetle Regimbartia attenuata looks like any other beetle. It is small, black, and pleasantly round. It has your standard set of beetle legs (six) and is otherwise unassuming. It is, you might imagine, the exact kind of bug that a frog would seek as a snack. But this water scavenger beetle is impervious to trials and tribulations that would kill any other insect. For one, it can pass through one end of a frog and emerge, utterly unscathed, out the other end. Shinji Sugiura, an ecologist at Kobe University, first learned of the beetle's abilities while investigating how insects defend themselves against frogs. He collected a variety of insects found in a frog-filled paddy field and fed them to his amphibians in the lab. When a frog ate any other species of beetle, it defecated the insect, several days later, as a carcass. This was perhaps to be expected. But the water scavenger beetle had other plans. If the beetle is swallowed by a frog, it can zoom on through the digestive system and be excreted within six minutes, alive and apparently none the worse for wear. Sugiura found that 90 percent of water scavenger beetles clawed their way out the frog's derrière alive, according to the 2020 paper he published in Current Biology. As you enjoy footage of the following experience, please note the nonchalant nature of the beetle and the freaked-out vibe of the frog.

It's always good when the NBA tells you when it plans to do something it has already decided to do. You can think of the NBA's all-but-announced expansion gambit as a hamster wheel. Not as a piece of exercise equipment for indentured rodentia, but as a consumer product—you get the wheel either because you already have a hamster or because you're going to purchase one in about 10 minutes, since you're already at the pet store (nobody really dabbles in rescue hamsters). Either way, it's not an impulse buy. So it is with NBA commissioner and astigmatic cadaver impersonator Adam Silver's declaration that the NBA Board of Governors—that's BOG, as opposed to GOB (Gang Of Billionaires)—is going to meet next week on the topic of expansion, almost certainly to Seattle and Las Vegas. This raises some obvious questions, none more obvious than whether the league has enough talent to expand when it already has eight to ten teams currently doing everything they can to avoid winning. And the obvious answer to that obvious question is "What the hell does basketball have to do with the NBA's business?" Expansion is one of the few topics that could get people's minds off the NBA's plethora of perceived shortcomings, because it is something new in a continent full of what's old. Or sort of new—everyone that pays attention to the league has known the two expansion cities involved for years without ever actually being told, proof that just because a league is secretive doesn't mean it can't still be transparent. Las Vegas will be the more expensive of the two franchises—think not of the $7-10 billion proposition quoted by insider sources (whoever they are), but likely well past $10 billion. This is only because Golden State is valued at $11 billion by Sportico, Forbes, and CNBC, the highest-ranking troika of organizations in the industry of pulling numbers out of thin air. Team ownership is a status game, and the competition between bored billionaires will be fierce enough to raise the price to one that would make a billionaire's heart rate quicken. Don't forget after all that Snoop Dogg once offered a billion to lead a consortium to buy the Ottawa Senators for Christ's sake, currently ranked 29th of the 32 NHL franchises, an indication of the intoxicating nature of sports ownership even as the rest of the planet becomes a charnel house.

On March 10, the Bigfoot Society noted an "unprecedented" multi-day mass migration of bigfoots—possibly bigfeet—in the vicinity of Portage County, Ohio. The "unidentified bipedal hominids" were moving southeast in a "coordinated movement." Two bigfoots were spotted around Mantua on March 6 and 7, at least one of them making "auditory grunts." Three more bigfoots were spotted on March 9; a sixth bigfoot—a big sucker, 10 feet tall—was seen the next day, around Newton Township. Before you scoff—you cheap skeptic, you ignoramus, you fool—you should know that the Bigfoot Society considers all of these sightings to be "high-credibility reports," so put that in your damn pipe. The Bigfoot Society continues to track what it has dubbed "The Ohio Bigfoot Flap." Why are the bigfoots moving? Good question. Today, just after 9:00 a.m. ET, in that same region of northeast Ohio, a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere and kerploded, rattling windows, toppling delicate shelf-top arrangements, and startling the bejeezus out of thousands of unprepared Rust Belt types. The National Weather Service tracked the meteor, and a guy with a "bus garage camera" caught some video. The meteor was clearly visible in the sunny morning sky, because it was a huge raging ball of extraordinarily hot flaming space rock. Look at this! https://twitter.com/drjimlloyd/status/2033901268008087827

Chip-maker Nvidia became a multi-trillion-dollar company the classic way: by selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush. As the generative AI bubble swelled and distended, Nvidia was there to sell the GPUs needed to feed it. Today it owns more than 80 percent of the market for chips involved in AI. This has been great for its shareholders, and less than great for anyone looking to purchase consumer electronics at normal prices. But Nvidia's roots are in video games, still one of the most processing power–demanding things the average person interacts with on a regular basis. It has supplied graphics processors to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. At a presentation on Monday, Nvidia introduced its newest technology, bringing generative AI to gaming. And it looks mega-butt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJACkKbN-Eo

The greatest betrayal of my life was when my little sister texted the group chat a screenshot of the movie Goat with a demand to "clear your calendars," and over my protests, my older sister agreed, saying that she was "actually dying to see this movie." The screenshot my little sister provided declared that ANDRE IGUODALA IS IGGY THE REF, a zebra, which was burying the lede. As it turned out, not only is Andre Iguodala Iggy the ref, but Stephen Curry (on top of producing the movie) is Lenny Williamson the giraffe, Nicola Coughlan is Olivia Burke the ostrich, and Gabrielle Union is Jett Fillmore the black panther. Also, Dwyane Wade is Rosette the bull, Angel Reese is Propp the polar bear, and A'ja Wilson is Kouyate the American alligator. In accordance with sibling duty, we all went to see the movie for my little sister's 20th birthday, which meant that the three of us were the only childless adults over the age of 20 in the theater. The previews advertised such movies as an uncanny valley Cat in the Hat adaptation; The Super Mario Galaxy Movie; another animated joint, The Pout-Pout Fish, starring Nick Offerman as the Pout-Pout Fish; and The Sheep Detectives, a film in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston voice, respectively, Lily the Shetland sheep and an unnamed black Castlemilk Moorit sheep (I would like to watch this movie). After Goat ended, a small gaggle of nephew-style children debated the Jett Fillmore character's levels of "unc" and "gyatt." Safe to say that my sisters and I were not the target audience for this film. I am choosing not to have many opinions about the movie itself, which was animated very charmingly and told a classic sports tale about dreaming big, paced like 20 music videos stitched together. I can say that I was never bored. Also, I did learn a lot of facts, some of them about animals, and all of which I now take as fundamental truth and will incorporate into my worldview. The facts I have managed to retain over the past 24 hours are listed here:

Arsenal's blunt-object dominance of the Premier League has given non-Gooners little to enjoy this season. It's not much fun to watch a team set-piece and defend its way to a title, even if the whole point of soccer is to win games by any means necessary. I don't have to like it, and I don't have to respect it, but Mikel Arteta has cracked the code that has eluded so many previous Arsenal sides: score more goals than you concede. I know, real rocket surgery here, but Arsenal has almost entirely abandoned the aesthetic pursuits the club used to hang its hat on in favor of a win-at-all-costs mentality that has earned the club disdain and points in almost equal measure this season. Of course, if it were not for the so-called haramball deployed by Arteta and his band of soon-to-be Premier League champions, would Max Dowman's maiden Premier League goal have hit quite as sweetly as it did on Saturday? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yK6-zQsjM

On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: Your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really good on the red carpet. This year, the big winner of the red carpet was the brooch. I would say that these are not your grandmother's brooches, but they quite literally are your grandmother's brooches. The hottest men (and some women) in Hollywood are pinning butterflies and shrimps and flowers to the lapels of their coats just so that the light catches them and shines. It was not the first time that brooches have appeared on the Academy Awards red carpet—fashion icon and beautiful man Colman Domingo has been wearing them for years to Hollywood events—but this year they reached saturation. Every big leading man, it seemed, had a brooch on, and if they didn't have one on at the award show, they sure as hell had one on at the afterparties. Let's look at a few of the best from Sunday night's awards. Here is a closeup of Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, at the Vanity Fair afterparty, and look at those stunning, star-shaped brooches on his lapel. I love the addition of the pink one as a little pop of color. The placement of all three in a triangle also mirrors the triangles created by the suit jacket and the lapel itself, which I find very satisfying.

There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critically acclaimed work for so long that eventually, usually 10 or more years after your true prime, the Academy will reward you in part to right past wrongs—the Martin Scorsese way. Sunday night, Paul Thomas Anderson became the latest filmmaker to get the pseudo lifetime achievement Oscar when One Battle After Another won six awards, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. It's not that One Battle is a bad movie or a lesser work, but it is one of those clear inflection points in a lengthy career, one that allowed the Academy to celebrate a director that it had mostly ignored up until now. The Academy has always kinda worked like this, torn between crowning a new generation—seen this year with Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor and Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman to win Best Cinematography—and feting the older one for their years of service. As a fan of Anderson's work, I've long thought he was overdue for more recognition from the Academy. There Will Be Blood is his most obvious masterpiece and was well positioned to get him a statue, though it had the unfortunate luck to go up against the Coen brothers' similarly masterful No Country For Old Men. The Master won the Oscar of my heart, but it was much too strange and polarizing for the Academy's infamously bland taste. For Phantom Thread, his last true five-star film, the award-season narrative was more about Daniel Day-Lewis's one last ride than Anderson. To go back even further, Boogie Nights was one of those movies that marked him as a potential Oscar-winner in the future but, like The Master, was too out there for the Academy to award it in the moment, while Magnolia seemed designed to simultaneously chase and repel the Oscar. As far as a late-period work goes, I maintain that One Battle is a rich text that can be thrilling and confounding all at once. In that way it does feel akin to The Departed, the one that finally got Scorsese his little gold man. They're two movies that show what's great about their directors as well as what can be frustrating, and I think both movies will only grow in critical estimation as time goes on.

Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly by galling margins. Now that losing is exactly what they need to do, they have turned into an accidental juggernaut, proving in the process that the essence of incompetence in the NBA is not losing so much as it is a lack of cohesive vision. Amid all the anxiety about tanking, the Kings stand as a potent counterexample to the notion that the practice is simple and thoughtless. It is, as they demonstrate, something you can be bad at. One aspect of the aforementioned anxiety about tanking that I find to be misplaced is the idea that fans of tanking teams are necessarily experiencing anguish because their teams are losing. This imagines the fan as a sort of noble savage, conceiving of poor Wizards or Jazz fans as confounded at the idea of trying to get the first overall pick in the draft. Fans aren't stupid, and while the experience of paying American dollars to go watch Micah Potter hoist 11 threes doesn't carry the same thrill as getting to watch a good team, not only do ticket prices reflect the ugliness of the hoops on offer, I think fans of any team that's been rewarded for tanking (read: every team except Miami) would tell you that sacrificing a few months of faux-competitive basketball for an All-NBA talent is more than worth it. There is a marshmallow test here, and whether you find the incentive structure of tanking gross, there's no disputing that it works. But I am a fan of a tanking team and I am experiencing anguish, because the Kings are winners of four of their last five games and six of their last 11. This is surprising for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that this hot streak began the moment the Kings sent their "good" players away for the season. Funny as it is that the theoretical core of the team was holding it back, the departures of Zach LaVine and Domantas Sabonis for season-ending surgeries cleared the way for DeMar DeRozan to dribble the basketball for 18 seconds before hoisting a contested midrange jumper, and for Russell Westbrook to sprint around and run into people. That stuff does not help you win games that matter, but it's great for punishing bad opponents.