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The Cambrian period is most famously remembered as an era of biological experimentation, with bizarre creatures such as Hallucigenia, whose body resembled anti-bird spikes, and Wiwaxia, which looked like a medieval flail come to life. But the Cambrian should also be remembered as a time when shit got extremely real for fish. If life in the oceans seems scary now for anything small and soft-bodied, they were undoubtedly scarier 518 million years ago in the Cambrian period. For eons, the oceans belonged to filter feeders, which raked in plankton and other animalcules rather peacefully (for everyone except for the plankton, of course.) But over time, the oceans gave rise to large, carnivorous predators, which meant little fish needed to adapt if they were going to make it out of the Paleozoic period alive. Myllokunmingiids, the earliest fossils that look anything like fish, were discovered in China and hail from around 518 to 530 million years ago. One species of myllokunmingiid called Haikouichthys was, scientifically speaking, just a little guy, topping out at about an inch long. Like a modern fish, Haikouichthys had a head, a modest array of slits that looked like gills, and a distinct muscle-bound spine. Unlike modern fish, it lacked a jaw. Instead of a modern fish mouth, it had a conical opening like that of a lamprey or hagfish. It didn't have much in the way of fins, either. Now, a new paper in Nature suggests that Haikouichthys diverges from modern fish in another key way: Instead of two eyes, Haikouichthys had four. The authors, a team of researchers from China and the United Kingdom, examined some exquisitely preserved fossils and found Haikouichthys and another myllokunmingid had two larger eyes outside their heads and two smaller eyes in the middle of their heads. All four eyes contained melanosomes, organelles that produce and store melanin and control coloration and light absorption in eyes.

It is the end of your Winter Olympics event. You have crossed the finish line, landed all your jumps, or done whatever sporting melange comprises the biathalon or Nordic combined successfully enough to earn yourself a medal. Congratulations! But your body is feeling a little crazy. Your skin feels amphibious from the swamp of your sweat. Your face is numb from the elements, slapped by gusting winds and battered by wintry mix. Your moisture-wicking performance-wear has nobly completed its mission and now sticks slick to your back. Your helmet has come off, and your damp hair has begun to ice over. But you know there's no need to fret, because it's time for the best part of any winning Olympian's day. That's right: It's time to get cozy on the podium. Here we have a quintessential example of some fellas staying cozy on the podium. Alex Ferreira of the United States, Henry Sildaru of Estonia, and Brendan MacKay of Team Canada, who won gold, silver, and bronze, respectively, all changed out of their official freestyle ski suits and opted for some more casual insulated outerwear for the podium. As is only traditional for podiums these days, the Olympians swapped their protective helmets for warm beanies. MacKay's maple leaf insignia is a wonderful reminder that he is both cozy and Canadian. The only way these lads could get cozier? By wrapping their arms around each other for a photo, of course!

In the third period of Sunday's USA-Canada gold medal men's hockey game, the American forward Jack Hughes spit blood after he took a high stick to the mouth from Sam Bennett. The ensuing four-minute penalty didn't lead to a U.S. goal to break the 1-1 deadlock, but less than two minutes into three-on-three overtime, Hughes earned his place in the history books with a golden goal that delivered his country its first Olympic men's hockey triumph since the 1980 Miracle on Ice. https://bsky.app/profile/bubbaprog.xyz/post/3mfhiu6eb7222 Taking notes on this game was like trying read a book in the middle of a nightclub. This hotly anticipated rematch of the 4 Nations final was high-stakes hockey that forced you to shake and scream and feel your heart pound with every change of possession. It rocked so hard that I can't even summon the strength to be upset about an undeserved Canada loss. The Hughes OT winner just evens them out after Sidney Crosby's extra-time heroics back in 2010, anyway.

The NBC Saturday primetime broadcast used the figure skating exhibition gala as a way to provide a curtain call for their appointed Olympic protagonists. Of the five segments they aired from the event, four of them put Americans in the spotlight. Amber Glenn gave a fierce performance that further emphasized her comeback from a disappointing short program. Alysa Liu skated a victory lap after her instantly iconic gold medal-winning free skate. And Ilia Malinin, who will be remembered for his poise in the aftermath of his shocking eighth-place finish, gave an earnest on-ice interpretation of how it feels to have all that pressure and attention so tightly focused on your ability to land a once-impossible jump. This abridged version of the gala was a fine send-off to the figure skaters (I could have done without Chock and Bates's whole bedsheet act, to be honest), but NBC's primetime edit drastically undersold just how Eurovision the whole thing was in full: campy and silly and full of moments that make you ask "Why that?" The gala serves as a window into the very specific interests of some of the great skaters in the world, and it declares—triumphantly, I would say—that taste and athletic prowess have nothing to do with one another. The silver-winning pair from Georgia put on a tribute to Mortal Kombat, complete with the voice that shouts "Mortal Kombat!" Niina Petrõkina pantomined shooting Malinin during a theater-kid's dream of a skate to "Cell Block Tango." Italy's Sara Conti and Niccolò Macii performed to, in order, "Macarena," "YMCA," and "Cotton Eye Joe." And the gold-medal winning Mikhail Shaidorov topped them all by spinning around in a panda costume, making his own farewell to Milan an homage to the Jack Black animated franchise Kung Fu Panda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDpO6zgVCrk

Megan Keller was a 21-year-old next-big-thing-on-defense when she won her first Olympic gold medal, in Pyeongchang, the winter before her senior year of college. She was also very nearly the reason her team lost it. The refs whistled her for an illegal hit on Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin late in overtime, and her teammates spent 95 chilling seconds on the penalty kill atoning for her sins. With the hindsight of a gold medal, Keller’s veteran teammates could be gracious about this. “She didn’t make a mistake,” Hilary Knight said afterward. “I didn’t agree with the call. She made some big plays, some big plays to keep the puck in. … She has this medal in her pocket and I hope she goes and gets four more.” That game foreshadowed the minutes-eating defender Keller would become for the national team and eventually in the PWHL. (She played just shy of 30 minutes in the Boston Fleet’s last regulation game before the Olympic break.) But even as she led her team in ice time in Pyeongchang, she had to enjoy the gold medal win at a distance. The 25 unserved seconds of her minor penalty meant Keller was ineligible for the shootout and would need to stay in the box for the rest of the game. Incredibly, the same sequence transpired at the women’s world championships the following year, in a nervy (and scandalous) gold-medal game between the U.S. and Finland. Keller took a slashing penalty with a little under two minutes left in overtime. When Alex Cavallini made the “golden save” in the Finland shootout, Keller skated into the celebration from the other side of the rink. You could say she was due. This time, the celebration skated into her.  https://youtu.be/qPzw0DRBmlg?si=vQs4Ee-jFs4Eng_G&t=367

Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports and active NBA agent, has drawn some ire this season for things he said on his new podcast called Game Over, which he cohosts with Max Kellerman. Anonymous members of the Lakers staff were reportedly mad at him for fake-trading Austin Reaves for Jaren Jackson Jr. Lakers fans are mad at him for causing the "disconnect" in the Lakers’ locker room. Stephen A. Smith was mad at him for not understanding that people see him as LeBron James’s mouthpiece. All of these reasons, I fear, are misguided. The only good reason to be mad at him is that he has leveraged the unlimited resources and power of Klutch Sports, CAA, Spotify, and The Ringer to make a daytime SportsCenter simulacrum without the catchphrases. Paul and Kellerman’s FanDuel-sponsored podcast is bad. It's bad in the sort of banal way that most podcasts are bad: The hosts don’t say much of substance, they are stricken with red light syndrome, and their riffs are obtuse and unimaginative. Paul started a recent episode with the line, "Can’t put a watch on without the time being right." This reads like some kind of adage, but Paul was literally just talking about his watch. 

This morning Dave McKenna was observing, with great pride, that Ireland had won zero medals at the Winter Olympics—not sure that any added context will help a reader here—so I decided to check in on the status of India's squad. There were only two athletes, both skiers: one in alpine and the other in cross-country. More had been written about Arif Mohammad Khan, the alpine skier from Kashmir, and I soon encountered these curious sentences in his Wikipedia entry: Khan’s expectation in Beijing was to ski and make it to the finish line.[7] Khan now has his eyes set on the 2026 Olympics.[8][9] You do not often hear an Olympian's ambitions summarized as "make it to the finish line." Time to consult the 2022 men's slalom results to see if Khan had in fact achieved his goal:

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe. This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Feb 18. In his second collection of recollections and reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the physicist Richard Feynman begins his book with the following anecdote:

I have to come clean about something. For a while now, when writing about the state of the Premier League title race, I have treated an impending Arsenal coronation as basically a fait accompli. This has been in part an earnest reflection of my belief that the Gunners have the best top-to-bottom roster in the world, employ one of the game's best managers, and, maybe most importantly, compete in a field without challengers of the level we've come to expect. However, I'd be lying if I denied that part of my written confidence in the Gunners was meant as a jinx. It would be so funny, and so incredibly Arsenal, if the team were handed every conceivable advantage en route to a title race they should by all rights win at a canter, only to wilt under the pressure and collapse before reaching the finish line. While I of course have no influence on the performances or states of mind of anyone on the team, I do get a dark little thrill when I imagine one of my Arsenal-supporting friends seeing me assure them on the page that they shouldn't fear the thing that they are obviously, rightly most terrified of, in doing so only increasing their dread. Now, no one with any familiarity of the club's historical reputation would've been surprised to see Arsenal ultimately fumble away the trophy. Nevertheless, I don't think even the biggest haters would've expected Arsenal's title charge to get this dire, this quickly. On Wednesday, the Gunners traveled to the West Midlands to face Wolves. The odd timing of the game (scheduled during the Champions League playoffs to compensate for Arsenal's domestic cup duties) and the gap in the table between the teams (first-place playing last-place) meant most neutrals probably didn't even bother monitoring what would've appeared to be an easy three-pointer for Arsenal. If you did decide to check the scoreline at some point during Club Brugge vs. Atlético Madrid or the like, you probably would've found what you expected. The Gunners got out to an early lead with a Bukayo Saka header in the fifth minute, and doubled the advantage about an hour later with Piero Hincapié's 56th-minute goal. Even later, should you have spotted that Hugo Bueno halved the deficit in the 61st minute, you probably wouldn't have assumed Arsenal was in any real risk. But what those context-free scoreboard checks would've hidden from you, which the final 2-2 scoreline cemented, was that Arsenal had been playing like total ass, and is now in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXllA7juRNE

When athletes are said to thrive under pressure, that generally does not mean that they do not feel it. Rather, the common understanding is that athletes, or at least the great ones, are capable of taking pressure and turning it into fuel. That thermodynamic process is a part of the incomprehensible psychology necessary to reach the pinnacle of competitive athletic greatness. What better source is there for relentless motivation than wanting something so badly, or having something to prove? Alysa Liu has no need for any of that nonsense. Where ordinary—or even extraordinary—athletes might be fueled by pressure, she simply doesn't feel any, ever. She thrives because she is immune. It was always understood that Liu could win gold at the Olympics, but with her technical content, she would need other skaters—say, Kaori Sakamoto, Ami Nakai, and Amber Glenn—to make errors. That assumption, however, always took one thing for granted: Of course Liu herself would never falter. And of course she would never falter! Listening to Liu, it's so easy to forget the broader narrative of there not having been an Olympic women's singles figure-skating medalist from the United States since Sasha Cohen won silver in 2006. A storyline can overwhelm a skater, but Liu is untouched by externalities. She takes an artist's pleasure in sharing her work with a broader audience, but other than that, she appears—or, at this point, with qualifiers surely unnecessary, simply is—so self-possessed that everything she does is truly for herself. If there were any doubts about Liu's mentality, she dismissed them on Thursday, by executing under benthic pressure when no one else could and walking away, unscathed, with a gold medal.