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Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. The year 1996 marked a major shift in music. An era-defining rap beef seemed to pit the entire city of Los Angeles against the entire city of New York. Rap as a whole saw its position in the industry skyrocket, as its biggest artists were becoming true pop stars, a phenomenon lead by Bad Boy Records and a certain producer who had completely overtaken rap radio. Even the genre's regional scenes, like in Atlanta and Houston, were blowing up and opening the door to even more overlooked markets to break through. Elsewhere, the boy-band movement was getting revved up in Florida. Alternative rock, which had exploded with bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains, was running on fumes—concerns over which heaped pressure on Pavement, fresh off 1995's Wowee Zowee (still their best album, idc), whom legions of unkempt white guys hoped would become the next big thing for the MTV Generation. Rock would soon undergo its own change to close out the '90s, getting more aggro, more hyper-masculine, more hip hop; this was in part a response by the labels to the changing landscape of popular music, and also a reflection that rock's rising stars were just as influenced by Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan as by Metallica and Led Zeppelin. https://youtu.be/dAVLkn-4B9o?si=B9AUfX6YQaUTuFJN

Lumpy, dirty piles of snow, shading to slush and then water, surround an unused rink. In the background, a featureless wall of grey, and a swollen cloud that threatens if not rain then no immediate prospect of sunshine. Deciduous trees bare their branches. In the distance, a single, unlovely apartment building dominates a skyline of single-family homes. In the foreground, atop a grey-brown ice sheet pooling with meltwater, is a single, squat conifer, hacked off at its base and lying on its side. Nothing lives here. Good morning Ottawa. Bonjour Ottawa. This would be an unremarkable photo if not for the fact that it was taken and posted by Mark Sutcliffe, the mayor of Ottawa, who presumably has an interest in portraying his city in a positive light. Instead, certain words spring to mind. "Drab," of course. "Barren," which pairs nicely with "wasteland." "Ugly," if you're feeling harsh and accurate. "I wouldn't want to live there," maybe, but that's an entire sentence. Ottawa has an image problem. Canada's capital and fourth-largest city is generally viewed as a sleepy, characterless government town. There is some truth to that. There is a lot of truth to that. It is still an incomplete picture. Ottawa has a wealth of museums, and vibrant if modest food and arts scenes. The Rideau Canal, repurposed to serve as the world's largest skating rink, is a true marvel. The point is, if you were looking to show off Ottawa, there are options to choose from. Better options than this:

Buh buh, buh buh, buh buhBuh buh, buh buh, buh buh Neh Neh-neh Neh-neh-nehNeh-neh-neh-neh-neh-nehNeh, neh, neh-neh neh, neh-neh Oye como va, mi béisbolBueno pa’ gozar: béisbol.Oye como va, mi béisbolBueno pa’ gozar: béisbol.

On Wednesday, the New York Yankees played the hosting San Francisco Giants in MLB's Opening Night, which was the first of really three Opening Day–esque events to open the season. Today will be the more traditional event of nonstop baseball brain: day baseball into evening baseball into midnight baseball, the Pirates and Mets starting it off with just one ordinary afternoon ballgame and not an overcooked nationalist extravaganza, in what would have been a lovely opening to the season. Tomorrow will service the six sad teams, and fanbases, who will have to wait until day three for their Opening Day. But yesterday was a capital-E event, which naturally made it feel not very much like Opening Day baseball at all. Here was the one night game, scheduled to start at 8:05 p.m. ET, aired only on Netflix, which made the big event something one would have to pay specifically for, or, hypothetically, borrow a friend's laptop in order to watch. The players ran through a line of yellow taxi cabs (Yankees) or a cable car (Giants) on their way to the field. There was some sweaty, red-faced man who shouted, "This is baseball, this is America, let's go!" There was an American flag in the shape of the United States of America. There were some pyrotechnics in the shape of an American flag (not shaped like the United States of America). The first pitch was thrown at 8:25 p.m. Eastern, 20 minutes late, on a basketball or hockey schedule. It was strike one to Trent Grisham, which was finally a fact insignificant enough to feel real. The game did not wind up being close enough to sustain any tension or drama; after the pomp of its opening, it registered as an anticlimax. Despite the best efforts of Aaron Judge, who went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts, the Yankees put up five runs in the second inning and two more in the fifth, with Giants starter Logan Webb gallantly soaking up all of the punishment. Meanwhile, Yankees starting pitcher Max Fried threw 6.1 shutout innings, thanks to his full arsenal of, according to Statcast, seven different pitches. The Yankees would win 7-0, without any intrigue.

I have bad news for anyone who was really into consuming or making videos of Charlie Kirk arresting Jeffrey Epstein, or SpongeBob SquarePants fighting Barack Obama in the format of a side-scrolling fighting game: OpenAI has suddenly and unceremoniously pulled the plug on Sora, its text-to-video generator app, after just four months and before a billion-dollar partnership with Disney ever really got underway. The long-prophesied supplication of all entertainment to uncanny, glitchy videos of Anthony Bourdain smoking weed with Mao Zedong will have to wait. OpenAI's first forays into video generation began in late 2024, though it was not until the release of Sora 2 in September 2025 that they wanted the world to take them seriously. More than a million people downloaded the app on Sept. 30, the day of its release; three months later, Disney announced that it had reached a landmark agreement to license its famously copyright-protected cast of animated characters for use in the app. This was a big enough deal that Disney CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the rounds together, to boast of the transformative potential of allowing people to generate videos of Nemo the clownfish performing oral sex on Goofy. As part of the agreement, Disney was set to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. In addition, Disney announced a suite of integrations it planned to shoehorn into its Disney+ streaming app. "Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+," the press release boasted, "and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI's models to power new experiences for Disney + subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney's stories and characters."

Spend enough time on the soccer side of social media and you're bound to come across one of those video-comp odes to the Barclaysman. As proud guy-rememberers ourselves, we of course do not begrudge the pleasant strolls down memory lane these highlight reels take you for, bathing nostalgic light on once beloved but semi-forgotten cult players, the ones who made the Premier League what it was back when the EPL was known as the BPL. But if it's worth singing the praises of yesterday's lesser nobility, then it's also worth giving props to the ones who are still kicking today. One such player deserving of some shine is Danny Welbeck, whose long career and his belated apex show just how major a minor legend can be. If it feels like Welbeck has been around forever, that's because he has. I'm unc enough to remember back in the Barclays days when the now-35-year-old was Manchester United's buzzy young hotshot, the latest exciting Carrington product from whom Alex Ferguson was sure to wring 20 goals a season in the coming years. Welbeck made his Premier League debut for United in November of 2008, about a week before his 18th birthday. But it wasn't until a few years later, in 2011, when he really announced himself as a potential force to be reckoned with. Coming into that 2011–12 season, on the heels of a solid loan campaign with Sunderland, Welbeck was well positioned to seize United's starting striker position, beating out the likes of Dimitar Berbatov and Javier Hernández for the right to take Wayne Rooney's hand in goaly matrimony. Welbeck performed the role respectably, scoring 12 goals across 39 appearances in all competitions in a season capped by United just getting pipped to the title by the famous Agüero goal. On their own, Welbeck's numbers weren't mindblowing, which explains United's addition of Robin van Persie the next summer, but his youth and the breadth of his skill set marked him as a serious talent we'd surely be hearing about for years to come. As it turned out, that both was and wasn't true.

It's opening day, sort of. The Yankees and Giants will start the season in San Francisco, today's only game. It's a Netflix exclusive, which is an annoying development if you, like me, want to watch this game but don't have Netflix and will not buy Netflix. But Netflix made MLB an offer it couldn't refuse. It's a reported $50 million over three years, for what feels like a fairly skimpy slate of programming: three opening-day exclusives, Home Run Derbies, and occasional special events, like the Field of Dreams game and WBC games in Japan. That is what happens when a company with too much money decides it wants to get into live sports. Another thing that happens is that the desire to make the game feel like An Event results in an overstuffed broadcast, where not a single second is allowed to pass without some recognizable face on screen. Here is the broadcast team:

Some will say that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is that the start of the next season, not unlike the spring that soon follows, will herald new hope for a better year. The truth is that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is the inevitable rules disputes, petty politicking, and snitchery that follows, often helpfully litigated through the media. Take, say, George Russell, before the Chinese Grand Prix, who was sure to lodge his complaints about the current race start procedure prior to the weekend. "Unfortunately," Russell said, "sometimes when you're trying to make changes for the good of the sport, if a team has a competitive edge—like Ferrari at the moment with the race starts—they wouldn't wish to see anything changing." Public opinion has historically been a little unfair to Russell's media statements, as he is not necessarily more of a complainer than any other F1 driver, but is simply cursed with the tone and mien of a schoolboy tattling to the headmaster. Not helping matters is his position as a Mercedes driver, where he forms a united front with his team principal and fellow Tier One rules advocate (read: complainer) Toto Wolff. Which is to say that race starts, and Ferrari's lack of interest in modifying the regulations, were furiously discussed ages before Russell's complaints in China. To start at the start for race starts, we naturally have to start at the new engine regulations. The biggest impact on race starts has been the removal of the MGU-H, which stored energy from the engine's exhaust gases and powered the car's turbocharger on demand; once the turbo was spun up sufficiently, it would give the engine more power. Because the MGU-H was expensive, heavy, and complicated for new manufacturers like Audi, it was removed this year, meaning the turbo can only be charged by the exhaust gasses produce by the running engine. The issue with race starts in 2026 is that each step of that process—the engine producing exhaust, the turbo charging, the engine receiving additional power from the turbo—takes time, resulting in a delay between when a driver demands power and when that power arrives, known as turbo lag. (A very helpful visualization of this process can be found in Chain Bear's explainer video.)

There are broadly speaking two types of gamblers: valuable and not valuable. All are referred to as customers. The latter group are dilettantes. These people deposit maybe once or twice, usually to take advantage of a first-time deposit promotion, but rarely or never again after that. Maybe they don't care much for sports, or are turned off by the way betting on sports makes watching sports miserable. Or maybe they tried the slots, and the slow drain of money down to zero left them feeling empty. Whatever the case, they don't have the itch. These customers are not valuable. I learned to sort gamblers into these categories during the years I worked for an online sportsbook. I worked in customer service, at first directly with customers and later in a more behind-the-scenes role. These jobs required a little bit of detective work, and I often found myself wading through piles of extremely detailed personal information about our customers. Names, addresses, payment history, net losses, geolocation, remarks left during previous customer service interactions; all of this was there for me to review any time there was a problem with a customer that needed to be solved. Through this process I got intimate looks into the lives of strangers.  What I came to understand while doing these jobs is exactly what kind of customer is most valuable to an online gambling company. All gamblers fall somewhere on a spectrum from habitual to compulsive to addicted. Addicts may be technically valuable customers in that they deposit regularly, but they are not desirable customers. You don't want your customers killing themselves or losing all their money. How then could they continue to deposit?

For my money, the funniest recurring bit in Amazon's highly variable action-comedy series Reacher is the use it makes of its main character's blank, brutal sociopathy. Reacher, in Reacher, is generally righteous, but the code that he follows serves mostly to offer him one shortcut after another to outlandishly brutal violence. He is swift and certain in his assessment of every situation, which means that he is often doing stuff like brusquely folding some henchman's body like a fine-dining waiter might fold a discarded napkin, to the evident horror even of those otherwise on his side. Reacher will squint and mutter something like "It was one of Col. Grissom's kill team," or "He was with the Ecuadorians," if questioned about it, and some short time later, he will say "I want pancakes now" in roughly the same tone. But that is just my opinion. If you polled most Reacher watchers, they would probably tell you that the funniest Reacher trope is how many characters try their luck against him in single combat. Reacher is canonically enormous, a Gronkowski-sized violence engine hard-wired to dispense compound fractures to those who exploit the vulnerable who is, paradoxically or not, absolutely catnip to members of the Exploit The Vulnerable community despite being effectively invulnerable himself. In Reacher, the role is played by the slightly less large but still objectively mountainous actor Alan Ritchson, and while the show throws in some visual gags grounded in Ritchson's size—two full-sized characters briefly obscured by his refrigerator-sized torso, one regulation-sized barbecue grill hurled through the window of a sedan—most of the size-related storytelling comes down to some version of this: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:g62tajye723r3fa4gqw7l7ql/post/3lisxyzct4k2e