NowLoop

When the dead body of Timmy the humpback whale beached itself last week off the shores of the Danish island of Anholt, it was only a matter of time before Timmy would risk of the fate that befalls many a beached whale: https://twitter.com/achillghost/status/2058958519747887516 The residents of Anholt, per the BBC, have watched Timmy slowly balloon in size as its guts and stomach begin to decompose. Timmy's body, skin taut and distended by gases, now lolls around a sandbank a short distance from the beach and drifting in the shallow waves. As one German television channel aired a livestream of its dead body, the channel included the number of a suicide hotline.

With less than three minutes to play in the first half of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant drove past Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and threw down a huge, nasty, two-handed dunk, pushing the Spurs' lead to 12 and sending the home crowd's decibel level into Krakatoan territory. When Devin Vassell immediately followed it at the other end by rejecting Chet Holmgren's point-blank dunk attempt and woofing in the dead-eyed noodleman's face about it, Thursday's game seemed on the verge of breaking open. It had been threatening to do that ever since the Spurs opened the night on a 9-2 run. The Oklahoma City Thunder reeled it back in, as they reliably do. Alex Caruso beat the shot clock with a three to salvage that possession, Gilgeous-Alexander hit a tough midrange shot and a pair of free throws, and Cason Wallace splashed a three. By the time the halftime buzzer sounded, San Antonio's lead instead was a manageable seven points. But the game had a pattern, one deeply unfavorable to the defending champs: The Thunder were grinding for every look they got, discombobulated and frantic, never more than a hair ahead of San Antonio's relentless ball pressure and warp-speed defensive rotations. Every basket they got felt like a completed Hail Mary. Meanwhile the Spurs were (relatively speaking) breezing through possessions, getting to their spots, running into threes off Oklahoma City's misses, muscling their way to the rim for tough, chesty interior buckets. It recalled Game 4 of last spring's East final, with the Thunder in the role of the scrambling New York Knicks and the Spurs as the Indiana Pacers: one team bailing water out of a rapidly leaking boat, the other team the ocean. Even the implacable Thunder can only stave off the ocean for so long. The teams traded buckets for the first few minutes of the third quarter, but Oklahoma City was in trouble. Three of their first four baskets of the half came via Isaiah Hartenstein's fuck-ass floater and a pair of tip-ins off misses, papering over aimless possessions. Sometimes this sort of thing amounts to a team staying afloat long enough to get the pumps running. Other times it is a sign that the boat is sinking.

The most maddening moments the New York Liberty have to offer are not the bad ones—not the turnovers, the biffed layups, the “just vibes” possessions on offense—but the moments here and there when things click and the whole team starts to play well. Those flashes of competence suggest there’s a switch that can be flipped for these nominal championship contenders. The maddening part is how rarely the Liberty seem inclined to flip it.  If we learned anything from their 84-74 win over the Phoenix Mercury on Wednesday, it’s that booing can flip the switch. A usually forgiving Brooklyn crowd started to grumble when the home team came out of halftime looking lifeless. It worked! The Liberty’s full-court press forced nine Mercury turnovers in the quarter, and they ended the third on a 23-0 run. It was enough to snap their three-game losing streak and bring them back to .500 on the season.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyiImT6Wg54

When we first had New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author David Grann on the podcast back in 2023, Drew and I mostly asked him the sort of things that we would ask one of our heroes when he happened to be out there promoting a new book. We had a good conversation about that book and his process as a writer, but the real surprise of the episode came at the end, when Grann revealed that he was a true sicko of a Knicks fan. It's one thing to talk to one of your favorite writers about writing, and quite another to talk to that writer about Eddie Lee Wilkins. We made a note that we'd have him back on someday to spend a whole episode talking about the Knicks, at some point when they were playing well enough to warrant a whole episode of their own. Well, about that: "The world is shit," the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z said early in our interview, "but the Knicks are great." We focused mostly on the last part of that, and much of the episode is given over to a somewhat giddy discussion of whether one of the NBA's most reliably tragicomic franchises really has figured something out, and whether they actually have a shot against whichever juggernaut escapes the Western Conference Finals. Grann does know ball, but he also knows the Knicks well enough to know that this moment of cheering for a juiceful and flourishing team is a pretty severe outlier.

Going into Roland-Garros, there was clear consensus: The greatest threat to Jannik Sinner was the Sun itself. It's the type of snappy one-liner that gets slung on the TV broadcast a dozen times a day, but it wound up prescient as the No. 1 seed melted down Thursday in a stupefying second-round loss to Juan Manuel Cerundolo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spv9oa4rwUQ Outside of celestial bodies, the top men's player wasn't slated to face much of a threat at the clay Slam. His rival Carlos Alcaraz had recently announced that he would sit out the summer to recover from a wrist injury. Part-time tennis player Novak Djokovic had barely clocked in for work since his impressive win over Sinner in Australia in January. In the meantime, Sinner had regained the No. 1 ranking, stomped the tour, and racked up records. When he arrived in Paris, he was winding down one of the best clay seasons in tennis history, having swept the three Masters titles, a feat previously achieved by only Rafael Nadal. Along the way, Sinner dropped only one set. Zooming out slightly further, Sinner had strung together six Masters titles in a row, which had never been done. He became the second player to complete the full set of nine Masters trophies, and he accomplished it seven years faster than Djokovic. I could bore you with even more, but I'll leave you with this simple number: Sinner had a 30-match win streak heading into his second-round match at Roland-Garros. I expected that number to extend to 36, and for him to lift the title that brutally eluded him by just one point last season.

James Wood is a pretty good leadoff hitter. Rookie Nationals manager Blake Butera, a disturbingly young fellow who looks like he should be one of the nine guys in this video, moved Wood to the top of Washington's lineup back in the spring, gradually swapping the places of Wood and former leadoff guy C.J. Abrams, who is now Washington's regular cleanup hitter. Wood is good at leadoff stuff: He leads the National League in walks and on-base percentage, and has successfully stolen 10 bags in 11 tries. Because he gets on base a lot, and because Abrams is thriving behind him, Wood leads the majors pretty comfortably in runs scored. The Nationals, in fact, lead all MLB teams in runs. All you care about is dingers. Wah wah wah, show me the dingers, you are wailing, smacking your sippy cup onto your tray table and shooting milk everywhere. Dingers are only one part of the game! Fine, here's a dinger: https://bsky.app/profile/nationals.com/post/3mms3clnza22y

The New York Jets have been pretty uniformly terrible on the field under the ownership of Woody Johnson, but the organization has lately been recognized as an innovative and industry-leading presence in integrating video game rankings and loutish patrician antics into its front-office processes. That hybrid approach has admittedly not yet borne fruit in terms of top-line indicators like wins, or recording even one interception over a 17-game season, but this sort of work takes time and evolves alongside the technology available. A team must accumulate some more abstract wins off the field before those successes show up in the standings. This work is not glamorous or public, but as New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo told Sports Business Journal, he's already seeing results despite just joining the organization in January after a long career in corporate America. The Jets organization, he said, has already made strides, because "91 percent of the Jets’ front office now uses Microsoft Copilot on a day-to-day basis—up from 'a handful' about a hundred days ago—with users averaging two-to-three prompts per day." How should Jets fans feel about the fact that a large and suspiciously precise percentage of the front office is now firing questions into the widely loathed and overwhelmingly unreliable AI modality in Microsoft's office technology? My friend, I am not in the business of telling Jets fans how to feel about things, and as a rule seek to limit engagement in that area to the extent possible. But it seems clear that Fusillo is pleased with the adoption of this bummy technology so far. "I call that level one, or horizon one," Fusillo told SBJ, "which is adoption." (The additional two levels, or horizons, have to do with "deeper levels of workflow automation," SBJ's Rob Schaefer explained.)

Don’t tell Jeff Krulik he’s famous, especially if anybody's around. “I’ll be with somebody and they’ll say to somebody, ‘Hey, this is the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot!” Krulik said. “And I know what’s coming next: A blank stare." "It's humbling," said Krulik, who really is one of the guys who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. But he is grateful for whatever renown he's gotten from the enduring, adored-by-all-who've-seen-it 1986 guerrilla documentary. It all started 40 years ago this weekend, when he and buddy (and fellow budding indie filmmaker) John Heyn showed up early to a Judas Priest show at the Capital Centre with a video camera borrowed from the local public access TV station and their eyes wide open. They rolled tape while cruising outside the Largo, Md., arena, capturing gaggles of great unwashed metalheads in their element. Period-piece characters now known by the film’s faithful fans as “Graham of Dope,” “DC101 Guy,” “Zebraman,” and “The Girl in the White Dress,” all of whom make Beavis & Butthead look preppy and lucid, spewed unscripted, unintentionally hilarious and unforgettable dirtball verse at a rat-a-tat-tat rate throughout the movie's 16 minutes. Rick Ballard, who appeared in Parking Lot as a teen Priest obsessive, then grew up to have a career in TV and run his own record label, hailed the movie in a 2016 interview as “the Citizen Kane of wasted teenage metalness.” 

The Montreal Canadiens have chosen an odd and ill-advised moment to test out a new, advanced, and almost transcendental hockey analytics notion. Either that, or the Carolina Hurricanes are putting together the first five-game sweep in history. Either way, we're getting something we've never seen before, and we're only going to get one more chance, Friday night in Raleigh, to see it. That is, unless the Canadiens manage to perfect their new signature move: scoring without shooting. It's only worked once so far, and that by accident, but head coach Martin St. Louis has fallen in love with the concept and has watched his lads lose their last three games in pursuit of it. Indeed, it can be said that the idea, which was sparked by their Game 7 win over Tampa Bay in the first round, has been their great white whale ever since. And never mind that they are now down eradication-to-one in the Eastern Conference Final … they are like a dog without a bone, and they will not be deterred from their goal of avoiding shooting. Wednesday night they were blitzed 4-0, and the highlights were established early when they waited eight minutes to take their first shot on a goal, a tip attempt from their repeated Game 7 hero Alex Newhook. By they time they took their third shot, Carolina with their world-weary and traditional method had scored three times, and after an aberrant second period in which Montreal took a normal amount of shots (10) and got nothing for it, they went back to the plan and put no shots on goal over the first 17 minutes of the third period. Carolina didn't score either in that entire stretch, but as soon as Nick Suzuki went rogue and ripped a 30-footer at narcoleptic Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen, the Hurricanes became angry at the Canadiens' effrontery and first hit the Montreal crossbar (Nik Ehlers) then scored seconds later (Andrei Svechnikov) for the completely gratuitous fourth goal. It's almost as if the two teams had agreed ahead of time that Montreal would stop trying to score, and when Suzuki broke the pact, the Canes used their old-fashioned methods to punish the Habs for backing away from their innovative spirit.

The specifics are a little difficult to pin down, but that’s true of most things surrounding novelist, filmmaker, and playwright Missouri Williams. Here are the facts I’ve been able to piece together: At some point in her young adulthood, Williams began to have seizures. In a 2025 interview with TriQuarterly, Williams said that the episodes began after she had moved to “a new city with a new language” (location and tongue unspecified), and while she was working in a cafe while trying to learn more than simple phrases. As she put it: “I spent a lot of time getting orders wrong, being reprimanded without quite understanding why. It was useful to feel so stupid.” Around this time, misfires in her temporal lobe began to incite epileptic episodes. These issues in the part of the brain responsible for language and memory completely destabilized Williams. Already struggling to get a foothold in her new surroundings, she then began to forget words in her native English. She found that she was thinking entire sentences backward. She made woozy, tenuous connections between ideas and objects. “Everything suggested everything else in the strangest of ways,” she said. Unable to hold onto words, ideas, or memories, Williams began an obsessive cataloging. She built a network of complex sentences that would circle back and collapse in on themselves like murmurating birds. It was as if each word was “driven by the need to confirm each and every thing that had preceded them,” as she wrote for Granta in 2022. Soon these sentences began to pile up, and eventually she was able to shape many of them into a book. The Doloriad, Williams's award-winning 2022 debut, reached an instant sort of cult-classic status, partially for its body-horror grotesqueries, but also for its undeniable beauty and off-kilter theology. The book suggests that as one gets closer to Christ, His wounds open up on your body. The Divine and The Gross often coexist.