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Victor Wembanyama, who sustained a concussion in Tuesday night's Game 2 between his San Antonio Spurs and the Portland Trail Blazers, has been cleared by medical personnel to return to action in Sunday's Game 4, according to a report by ESPN's Shams Charania and Malika Andrews. https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2048472286395551853 As Defector's Patrick Redford wrote on Wednesday, concussions are notoriously tricky injuries, with notoriously unpredictable recovery processes and timetables. These are realities which have always cast a little bit of suspicion on the various sports leagues' ballyhooed brain-injury protocols: Somehow, superstar athletes seem to pretty much always complete their concussion recoveries in time to appear in their team's next do-or-die game, if not its next do-or-die return from a TV timeout. Stipulating that all brains are different, and that I know nothing more about the condition of Wembanyama's than anybody else who has never met him and only saw the event of his concussion on TV, this recovery seems particularly dubious to me. The dude's head bounced on the hardwood after falling from, well, Victor Wembanyama's height.

No one was shot and killed at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner Saturday night at Washington, D.C.'s Hilton Hotel. President Donald Trump—who is presently waging an illegal war of aggression against the nation of Iran and aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine; who is responsible for the killing of at least 180 people in military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world due to the targeted withdrawal of humanitarian aid; who is orchestrating a campaign of domestic terror and brutality against immigrant and minority communities in the U.S.; who is weaponizing the Justice Department against his personal enemies; who is running the most nakedly corrupt and lawless administration in U.S. history; who a few weeks ago threatened to jail a journalist who reported on the downing and rescue of an American pilot in Iran if they didn't reveal their sources—was unharmed. On a different floor of the Hilton, several layers of security away from the Correspondents' event, an individual carrying at least one firearm reportedly sprinted through a security checkpoint, exchanged fire with law enforcement, and was arrested. According to authorities, the assailant is named Cole Tomas Allen, and evidently traveled by train from the Los Angeles area to D.C. for whatever he was trying to do at the Hilton. In the commotion of his attack and arrest, Allen is reported to have fired a shot that struck a Secret Service agent's bulletproof vest. As a precaution, Secret Service agents evacuated Trump—who recently threatened to annihilate the civilization of Iran, and disseminated an image of himself depicted as Jesus Christ—and Vice President JD Vance from the dinner. After the remaining guests—who'd assembled in their finery to fête and network with the authoritarians strip-mining American society, rolling back rights and civil liberties, and rounding up demonized minorities into literal concentration camps, and who will return unscathed to their stations of power over the rest of us tomorrow—milled around for a while, taking selfies and helping themselves to the abandoned bottles of expensive champagne left on tables, security personnel informed them that the evening's festivities would not resume and instructed them to leave. A little while later Trump spoke to the press, including CBS News White House correspondent and WHCA member Weijia Jiang, who'd been seated beside him at the dais during the dinner. The recipient of a $400 million luxury airliner gifted him by the royal family of Qatar, presently engaged in a scheme to sue his own Treasury Department into paying him $10 billion, boasted that, to the extent the fracas at the security checkpoint may have represented an attempt on his life, it attested to his historical importance.

The top-seeded Detroit Pistons are quietly in a lot of trouble—not just because they are down 2-1 in their series against the eighth-seeded Orlando Magic, but because in those two losses, Orlando has looked like the superior team. The Magic have looked faster, tougher, and like they have the better roster of shooters most nights. Detroit essentially needs to find a way to blow out the Magic in order to beat them, because if it's close, it seems to be tilting in Orlando's favor. Not one person could've predicted that outcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPA4nDnBcMY Not even a full month ago the Magic looked dead in the water, like the team was ready to full-on mutiny against its coaching staff. Suddenly they are all healthy at the right time, and Orlando looks to be realizing the potential they've shown in flashes over the past couple seasons. As for the Pistons, well, they're the top seed for the first time since 2007, and here they are, led by burgeoning superstar Cade Cunningham—being taken by surprise by the Magic, mainly thanks to role players who have come alive for Orlando and died on the vine for Detroit.

Picture it: You're the Minnesota Timberwolves, and two of your starters have just gone down with severe injuries in the first half of Game 4, including your best player Anthony Edwards. You're up 2-1 in the series, but the Denver Nuggets have momentum going into the half. Well, obviously this is the time to unleash the Dosunmu. And unleash they did. https://youtu.be/btkGLagKgn8?si=eaFRH7qYHrV6W1FQ Ayo Dosunmu, a last-minute trade-deadline pickup from the Chicago Bulls earlier this year, broke out with a career-high 43 points in a career-high 42 minutes, in the Timberwolves' dramatic 112-96 win over the Nuggets to take an authoritative 3-1 lead in the series. Dosunmu shot 13-for-17, including going 5-for-5 from the three-point line, and additionally hit all 12 of his free throws—a stat line that would be insane for an all-star, let alone a role player who had been withering away in Chicago just a few months ago.

Basketball is a sport where five teammates work together to dribble and pass the ball up the court and ultimately toss it into the hoop. Certain exceptions exist. For instance, the final possessions of a close New York Knicks playoff game. Here, basketball is a sport where a solitary little fella bounces the ball indefinitely until he has no choice but to fling it in the direction of the hoop. That is a fair description of the final Knicks possessions Thursday in Game 3 of their first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks, one of which ended in a Jalen Brunson airball, and the other in a Jalen Brunson turnover, as the Knicks lost by one point for the second consecutive game. Brunson is a one-man offensive system (complimentary and derogatory). He is an incredible talent. Were he not on the team, the Knicks wouldn't be remotely good enough to disappoint as violently as they do. But he has his preferences, which have held fast across different coaching regimes. He likes to hold onto the ball. He likes to dribble and dribble and probe the defense with a sequences of head fakes, hesitations, crossovers, shoulder bumps, pivots, until he's pried open a tiny bit of space to get off his jumper. (These moves, while deft, might also get a little easier to predict over the course of a seven-game playoff series.) Often, when the defense collapses on Brunson, you can see him seeing a passing window and deciding against it, because he'd rather avoid the risk of turnover and take the shot himself. These tendencies are exacerbated to comical extremes when the stakes are highest, and the defenders are playing hardest. His teammates—because the coach has told them so; because they have great trust in their captain; because their capacities for off-ball movement have atrophied while playing alongside him—often stand stationary while he breaks it down. This tendency wasn't specific to former head coach Tom Thibodeau's infamously stodgy offenses. We see it still under the regime of current head coach Mike Brown, who was brought in to give them some new offensive juice, and to take better advantage of the other extremely talented players on the roster, like Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, and Mikal Bridges, all of whom can create their own shot against a defense in rotation. I'm not even saying that Brunson isolation is a bad outcome for a given possession. Perhaps it is better than passing the ball to Bridges, who, if he caught the ball under the rim, while all five defenders laid down supine on the hardwood, would still find a way to still take an 11-foot drifting jumper. I am just saying that I, personally, cannot look at it anymore. I need to see the ball change hands. I need to see a non-Brunson Knick take footsteps more purposeful than shifting their weight from one foot to the other. I would rather lose on a too-cute offensive set that sends a bad pass flying into the fourth row than watch Brunson take 40 dribbles into a double-team. I'm going to die.

Chances are you haven't seen or thought of Tony Dokoupil in a while, and you wouldn't be alone. Dokoupil's CBS Evening News is lagging well behind ABC and NBC's nightly news programs, recently dropping under 4 million viewers per night. But TV ratings aren't necessary for what you can see with your own eyes: The CBS anchor is a dud with poor direction, and everyone knows it—including the people who work with him. On Thursday, Vanity Fair published a piece full of brutal quotes about Dokoupil's time as Bari Weiss's pet. There's some clarity provided on why he had such a rough start in the job in January. Remember when Dokoupil ate shit on his first regular broadcast and screwed up a line read? That's reportedly because Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief, fiddled with the script to make Donald Trump look better, and typed her changes in the wrong place. "The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds," Aidan McLaughlin wrote. The Vanity Fair article is based off 20 or so sources, some of them anonymous CBS staffers. As anyone could've figured out, Dokoupil's weirdly hostile interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2024 was what got Weiss's attention. (Dokoupil reportedly went off script with his questions in that interview.) When she was put in charge of CBS News, Dokoupil became her anchor, but only because no one good was willing to do it.

"Ahoy there, perverts!" are the first words out of Gabby Windey's mouth. The host of the new Hulu show Love Overboard stands on the deck of a 280-foot superyacht named The Chakra, wearing a gorgeous, slinky dress with cut-out sections. "Welcome to Love Overboard!" she says, throwing her hands over her head. The appetite for reality shows about young, hot, stupid people competing to find love or Instagram followers, or both, is bottomless. It's a crowded field. Off the top of my head, there's Temptation Island, Perfect Match, Love is Blind, Love Island, Too Hot to Handle, FBoy Island, Single's Inferno, The Bachelor, Are You the One? and The Ultimatum. And most of those programs have seasons in multiple countries and multiple languages. There is an endless buffet of choices for anyone who wants to watch people in bikinis backstab each other in order to make out with someone they've never met before, which is perhaps how Love Overboard's premise ended up as deranged as it is. The contestants on Love Overboard (young hot singles, duh) do not know what they have signed up for. They have agreed to go on a reality television show sight unseen, and now they are here, in what nobody wants to admit is essentially the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Much has been made of the arid state of NBA rivalries, a parched climate that owes itself to, depending on who you ask, player empowerment, AAU culture, the parity era, or the internet's anti-geographic effects. There's something to this, though all but the most committed Celtics-Lakers nostalgists would admit to at least one current exception: Nuggets-Timberwolves. These two teams are perfect stylistic and temperamental foils for each other, and they're currently three games into their third playoff series in the last four years. The present go-round is as laden with spite and loathing as the last one, a seven-game second-round slugfest in 2024, delivering reliably great theater and occasionally great basketball. As I was watching the Wolves dominate Game 3 on Thursday night, which they won 113-96 to grab a 2-1 lead in the series, I was struck by the impression that the emotional center of both the Wolves and their rivalry with the Nuggets is the brilliant, irrepressible Jaden McDaniels. Each of the past two postseasons, Minnesota has reached the Western Conference Finals, somewhat against the expectations of many experts, though the Wolves' style makes them the most obvious group of playoff risers in the NBA. The issues that plague them in the regular season—drifting focus, weak backend rotation, a tendency to play down to inferior competition, Julius Randle all but sleeping on the court—are of a sort that burn off in the playoff crucible. Their strengths—indomitable physicality, a rock-solid top-seven, autarkic anchors on both ends of the court—matter way more. The guy that makes it all work is McDaniels. The wiry Seattle native is the ideal complementary wing player, in terms of both his skillset and the edge he gives his team as a leader. McDaniels can guard up and down the lineup, he's a good rebounder, and he's figured out exactly how to play as a third and occasional fourth option. The consensus theory of this sort of player is that they are best left in the corner to provide a release valve for those responsible for dribbling the basketball. McDaniels has done a good deal of that in his career, though this year especially he has elevated Minnesota's offense by greatly improving his offensive game. He's now way more comfortable attacking closeouts and finishing in the lane, and he's figured out that when his drives get stopped, he can pass the ball to a teammate. The trick with McDaniels is that he's comfortable playing like a higher-usage player in a supporting role. He's not waving off Anthony Edwards to go one-on-one; he's found the right balance of aggression and deference.

There’s an apocryphal story concerning the original pitch for Girls: Supposedly, Lena Dunham wrote it on the back of a cocktail napkin. It was all vibes but no plot or fleshed-out characters, and situated the show concept somewhere between Gossip Girl and Sex and the City. It was about the sort of girls Dunham—then 23 years old and making a web series in SoHo—knew and was friends with. The cocktail-napkin pitch has become a metonym for her career more broadly—evidence of either her breezy genius or the unacknowledged privilege that underpins it all. Except, Dunham writes in her new memoir Famesick, that story is bullshit. “I’d actually written it on my brother’s laptop, borrowed for the trip.” Dunham wants you to know that she understands her name ceased to be a precise identifier for her individual person long ago. She accepts that a life and legacy defined by those stories is the price she’s paid for fame. She gets it, she really does. But she wants you to know her side, too. Famesick is a granular, exhausting, 15-year-long account of her side, from her early days as an indie filmmaker in New York, her stay in rehab for a Klonopin addiction, to her new life in London with her husband, musician Luis Felber. 

Lily Yohannes plays soccer with an efficiency that would come off as mechanical if she didn't have the vision of an artist, resulting in some of the most beautiful dribbling sequences and long through balls that have ever graced a pitch. Indeed, the 18-year-old OL Lyonnes star is the USWNT's best midfield prospect in a decade.  Considering she shot into the elite echelons of soccer at such a young age—while she was 16 and playing for Ajax, she became the youngest player to ever start a Champions League group stage match—it's no surprise that her family has been a large part of her story. And what a family she has. Both of her brothers play professionally: 20-year-old Jayden plays for SC Telstar’s U21 side, and 22-year-old Aethan plays for Almere City FC's youth team as well as the Eritrean national team.  Her father, Daniel, has been her most outspoken supporter. Daniel's Twitter account reads like a standard—if more thoughtful than most—soccer stan account, so long as you ignore the posts when he mentions being Lily's father. He reposts compilation videos other people have made of Lily's highlights, writes tactical analyses of Lily's and other games (he's a Chelsea supporter), talks about pay equity in the women's game, and makes the occasional impassioned political post.