NowLoop

This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged. Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada. The younger-kids division included a 4th-grader who was training with the reigning North American title-holder, Mack Meller, who himself competed in the event more than a decade earlier.

The UFC and FBI announced on Wednesday that a group of MMA fighters will visit Quantico this weekend, "to host an exclusive training seminar for academy students as well as senior FBI staff from around the world." I think we can all guess which senior FBI staff member wanted the chance to play fantasy camp. The following quote was likely delivered by an excitable little guy already wearing compression shorts and hand wraps: "I’m thrilled to announce this historic seminar between the FBI and the UFC at Quantico," said FBI Director Kash Patel. "This is a tremendous opportunity for our FBI agents to learn and train with some of the greatest athletes on earth - helping the world’s premier law enforcement agency be even better prepared to protect the American people. Dana White has changed the game in the mixed martial arts industry and we’re extremely honored to be partnered with him, the professionals, and the UFC. We are grateful for their shared love of our nation, so that we can better defend her."

You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of "The Young Women Leaving the New Right," a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented by, in Adler-Bell's formulation, the "overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke" (I suppose she and Adler-Bell may share the delusion that this ever was a thing), Anna dropped her flimsy, contrarian liberalism in the mid-2010s to become "a celebrated pundit of the New Right"—only to later discover, to her evident dismay and horror, that the New Right is a right-wing ideological movement of people with right-wing beliefs dedicated to furthering right-wing causes. That's rough, buddy! Anna, you see, is "somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time" (her words), a trait she shares with literally every human who has ever existed or will ever exist, but which she, a solipsistic bigot, believes makes her too raw for the kinds of social spaces where people think a joke must do more than put a hard R on the N-word to be funny. The "humorlessness" of the left—which is to say, certain types of people correctly regarding her as a boring moron—turned her off. She was, in her words, "in love with the frisson of transgression." For this reason Anna decided to become a fascist. Later she discovered that the right-wingers organizing themselves since long before she was born around the idea that social progress should be reversed and rights withdrawn from certain types of people regard her as one of the types of people from whom rights should be withdrawn. Now she wants a new scene.

People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way to capture and hold a listener’s attention. It’s easier to stumble upon video curated and served via algorithm than it is to click several buttons in a dedicated app in order to listen to a piece of audio.  In its attempt to gain a hold on YouTube’s domination of the internet’s passive viewing population, Netflix rolled out podcasts earlier this year with licensing deals with Spotify, Barstool, and iHeart, but if discoverability is any part of Netflix’s objective, it has failed abjectly with its new video podcasts, which were quietly launched at the end of January.  First of all, it’s nearly impossible to stumble upon podcasts on Netflix unless you know what you’re looking for. There’s no homepage carousel, no link in the home navigation, not even a category in the show genres dropdown menu. I clicked around the homepage for several minutes looking for a podcasts homepage before finally giving up and typing “podcast” in the search bar. This search yielded something that approximated what I was hoping for: a page of every show on the platform presumably tagged with the word “podcast,” arranged in no coherent order. 

On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative of crickets famous for their mimicry of leaves. Katydids have veined bodies that are often bright green like a new leaf or stippled brown like a fallen leaf. But this particular katydid was a seemingly unnatural neon pink. Rowe, who studies leaf mimicry in moths, brought the pink katydid to the office of his colleague Benito Wainwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "I was extremely excited," Wainwright wrote in an email. For the last two years, Wainwright has exclusively studied such katydids and how they evolved their leafy masquerade. But he'd never seen a pink katydid before. When he dug into the literature, he saw that pink katydids had been previously documented in scientific literature, albeit not in this particular species, Arota festae. But most of these papers were more than a century old and made no mention that the pink coloration could offer any advantage to the insects. Instead, "these individuals had been regarded as rare freak mutants that are disadvantaged by their conspicuous appearance," Wainright said. Rare freak mutant or absolute diva?

What do you listen for in a great movie score? An iconic theme, perhaps, or a meaningful leitmotif that ties the film together. Maybe you want something innovative, compositions that make a film feel contemporary as they mine the cutting edge. Or maybe you just want a grand, sweeping throwback that plays every piece of the orchestra like in the good old days. If you’re a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you probably want a score so generic it can’t even be heard. This year was a fantastic year for film scores, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the Oscar nominees. Between Max Richter’s anonymous, self-plagiarizing Hamnet score and Alexandre Desplat’s Frankenstein-sized participation trophy, we have Jerskin Fendrix’s music for Bugonia, a collection of screeching strings as pleasantly atonal and immediately forgettable as the movie they’ve soundtracked. There are some standouts, of course. Ludwig Göransson’s Sinners score freely blends blues, power metal, and turntabling with snatches of Irish folk and fingerstyle Appalachian bluegrass, embodying the kind of transcendent cultural fusionism that Ryan Coogler’s plot sometimes struggles to accomplish; it’s much more exciting (and deserving) than his Oscar-winning work for Oppenheimer. Meanwhile, Johnny Greenwood has constructed a real-deal Hollywood score for One Battle After Another, leveraging the full orchestra for moments of grand-scale impact without ever tipping over into bombast. It would be easy to rag on the Oscars for its boring taste; I’ve just done it, and I’ll keep going. For one, they have long had a complicated relationship between music and merit. The first Academy Award for Best Original Score was given to the “Columbia Studio Music Department” in 1934, for the opera-set musical romance One Night of Love. For long stretches, the Academy gave out separate awards for musicals and non-musicals, or combined the musical and original song categories. As late as 1998 they still gave out one award for Original Musical or Comedy Score, and another for Original Dramatic Score, implying an innate distinction between the two. 

Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now, given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acronym the post-AI generation will have to grapple with, or just an ayahuasca-fueled fever dream. Anyway, the supposed factual record is implausible—nobody gets to shoot 43 free throws, and nobody has 31 in the first quarter, and for sure no team would actually put out a lineup quite as bereft as the Washington Wizards did Tuesday night. Maybe people in the future will think this because the NBA fixes tanking for good in three months, and teams being purposely abject for draft lottery purposes fades into feeling like a hallucination that never actually happened. Maybe people in the future will think this just because they are people. Hey, some people currently think that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points because there isn't film to prove it, and Adebayo's game was only on NBA League Pass and in a couple of local media markets, which is the modern version of the same thing. But maybe the easiest way to deny it will be because, well, Bam Adebayo had 83 points? That cannot possibly be, and so by fiat or just through the sort of attrition that applies to things like this, it didn't. Tinfoil hats don't make themselves, but they are built for comfort. But for all the teethwringing and gnashing of hands over Adebayo's performance as it was, it was exactly as normal and forgettable as other mega-games. It came against a remarkably bad team, but so did Chamberlain's (real) century and so did Kobe Bryant's 81 and so did almost all the other 70-plus point performances in league history. Adebayo got a ridiculous 43 free throws, which is a league record, yes, but one that is never cited as any kind of actual achievement in any other context, unless you count the fact that most of the other high-free throw guys were deliberately fouled because they couldn't shoot free throws. He scored more than half his team's points, which is supposed to be really selfish to the point of being unethical, but also do you know who else did that in a game? Willie Burton and Michael Redd.

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. "Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader," Iran sports minister Ahmad Donyamali said on Wednesday in reference to the U.S. government, "under ‌no circumstances ‌can we ⁠participate in the World Cup." He added, "Given the malicious actions they have carried ‌out against Iran, they have forced two wars on us over eight or nine months and have killed and martyred thousands ‌of our people. Therefore, we ⁠certainly cannot have such a presence." Donyamali's comments came on the heels of a related report on Tuesday, when FIFA president and autocrat ass-licker Gianni Infantino said on Instagram that he had met with our dear leader to talk about what the ongoing war meant for the World Cup, reporting back that "President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States." Infantino ended his message noting that "we all need an event like the FIFA World Cup to bring people together now more than ever, and I sincerely thank the President of the United States for his support, as it shows once again that Football Unites the World." As for the man himself, when asked last week for his thoughts about Iran at the World Cup, Trump responded, "I really don't care."

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome Will Anderson of Hotline TNT. Will is the main creative force behind one of my favorite guitar-forward bands, our second guest to be awarded Best New Music by Pitchfork, and a lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fan, though perhaps more relevantly, he is the publisher of Association Update, a great, long-running zine about basketball. On this episode, we discussed Will's admiration for Dennis Rodman, his antipathy for the Oklahoma City Thunder (next week, we will have a real, actual Thunder expert to defend his team's values) and why artists detest OKC so much, and his decision to remove his band's music from Spotify. He also told us about playing a show in Oklahoma City the night the Wolves won Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals last year, talking mild shit about the Thunder on stage, and getting screamed at in the merch line.

Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca is a generational talent. Or an imminent bust—you tell me. His scant tenure on the men's tennis tour has served as a case study in the lunacy of early-career cycles of hype and disappointment. What's clear is where he stands right at this moment, after a spine-tingling 7-6(6), 7-6(4) loss to Jannik Sinner on Tuesday night at Indian Wells: Fonseca is a prodigy with an intoxicating peak level, and one of the best forehands in the world, who can challenge the Sinner-Alcaraz regime more compellingly than players a decade his elder. Almost exactly three years ago, Fonseca was a 16-year-old playing his first-ever tour-level match at his home tournament, the ATP 500 in Rio de Janeiro. (He got annihilated; I didn't even remember that match happened.) The following year, he rolled back into Rio with a wild card and some baby fat, and beat both the world No. 36 Arthur Fils and world No. 88 Cristian Garin, nuking Fonseca's quaint plans to play college tennis at the University of Virginia. His future was in the pro game. At the time, I favorably compared him to Jannik Sinner at the same age, and predicted he'd be top 10 by the time he was 20. By the tail end of that 2024 season, Fonseca had climbed hundreds of ranking spots and fallen just short of the U.S. Open main draw, losing his last match of qualifying with a passionate pro-Brazil crowd that has since become a reliable, globe-spanning hype machine. The expectations rose even higher. To the extent it is possible for an 18-year-old to have an "underwhelming" season at the highest levels of pro tennis, I suppose Fonseca's 2025 fits the description. On paper, the achievements were unreal for a player that green: a Challenger title, a 250-level title, a 500-level title. But judging by the talent he displayed in his best matches, and his ease in high-pressure scenarios, he seemed capable of even more: pushing into the second week of a Slam, say, or cracking the top 20 in the rankings, both of which narrowly eluded him. His movement and conditioning still couldn't match the level of his ball-striking, though that could have been easily chalked up to his physical immaturity, and it wasn't until last month that my own projections of his future did finally darken. After Fonseca lost early in Buenos Aires, he and his team disclosed that he was born with lumbar hyperlordosis, a back issue that requires careful management, and that he suffered a stress fracture in his back five years ago. Some of his physical shortcomings could now be seen in a new, more concerning light.