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In close-up for much of The Testament of Ann Lee, her eyes brimming with light, Ann Lee seems to be in a persistent state of shuddering. The founder of the Shaker religious sect, played by Amanda Seyfried, shimmers, and rarely stays still, yet Seyfried’s performance manages to be deeply solid and earthbound at the same time. Early in the film, she crawls across a floor singing “I hunger and thirst/after true righteousness.” Her voice sounds like cold water, as she bathes on the floor in the light of the Lord.  To perform is to desire, and desire is a productive force. It makes something happen. Seyfried’s performance as Ann Lee lets the viewer in on the production of faith–particularly, an overt faith. In the theater while I was watching the movie, I noticed a little nervous laughter sometimes, especially when the actors were performing devotion through song and movement. Bearing witness to such performance leads to basic questions about people and the way that we live that Americans in particular are usually trying to suppress. Are we doing life wrong? Is our world not the only world, or our way of living not the preferred way of living? If Ann Lee cares so much, do I not care enough? Is she just attention-seeking? Is she putting one over on me? Am I being conned?  There is a scene in the film that stages this dilemma, when Ann and her acolytes are on a ship in high seas and snow on their way to spread the gospel in America. What Ann Lee does in this scene is enact the original meaning of “performative,” the definition from speech act theory, where what is called a “performative utterance” enacts—or attempts—the very thing that it describes. The most famous example is the “I do” in a marriage ceremony, where, through the very proclamation of the will to marry, people’s relationships are transformed legally, and therefore literally. But Ann Lee doesn’t wish to marry; she proclaims the inevitability of her salvation, willing it into effect:

For the majority of the NBA season, there has been an odd, Los Angeles Lakers–shaped hole at the center of the conversation. Chalk it up to Victor Wembanyama blocking out the sun, the feel-good Detroit Pistons, the feel-bad Los Angeles Clippers, or the gambling scandal that cast a pall over the proceeding five months of hoops, but there simply has not been that much to say about the Lakers, a blessed idyll for anyone who has had to endure national TV broadcasts and podcast segments discussing Rui Hachimura with a tone of grave seriousness. LeBron James, widely expected to hit the exit this summer, has just sort of been hanging around, while Austin Reaves got hurt at exactly the wrong time for what was looking like a fun outsider all-star candidacy. DeAndre Ayton, per an inevitable Dave McMenamin story, is exactly the moody weirdo everyone convinced themselves he wasn't when he signed with L.A. The most interesting thing that happened to them was Rich Paul floating a trade on his bad podcast. Yet preceding any of these shrug-inducing truths was a caveat, something like Yes, Luka Doncic is amazing, but. Lurking within the striving, flawed Lakers was the most unstoppable pick-and-roll operator in basketball. Not that Doncic's genius with the ball helped the Lakers look like anything better than the least threatening of the six legit teams in the Western Conference (until the Kevin Durant group chat fiasco) or kept Doncic himself from having a pissy, telegenically abrasive season. This year felt like a gap year, the last middling Luka Doncic team until the albatross of LeBron James's contract and stature let the Lakers really build the team around their prize from the Nico Harrison boondoggle.

Pixar has always been investing in protecting the Earth, at least in its movies. A Bug's Life illuminated the role of insects in an ecosystem, Finding Nemo called attention to marine pollution and coral reefs, and WALL-E, the most radical of them all, imagined a planet destroyed by corporate greed and rapacious consumption. These films all concerned a non-human protagonist leaving home and engaging with the world, an era followed by a slew of films more concerned with the interiority of humans, such as Inside Out, Soul, and Turning Red. In this way, Hoppers, a movie about a girl who uploads her consciousness into a lifelike beaver robot to save a patch of forest, feels like a return to form. Hoppers, like Pixar's pre-Disney films, is a delight. The beavers' world is immersive and richly realized, grounded in science but never dry. The plot zigs and zags between moments of absurdity and emotional heft to stirring effect; I cried multiple times, and not just because of the low-hanging fruit of grandma death. Despite the film's ultimate conclusions—about the rather pressing matter of what activism can and should look like, which left me bitter and jaded like the old man from Up before he gets his groove back—I had a blast. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!) Hoppers tells the story of Mabel Tanaka, who we meet as a child as she attempts to liberate the captive turtles, guinea pigs, and birds from her elementary school. Heist foiled, Mabel visits her grandmother, who takes her to a forest glade fringing the city of Beaverton that teems with beavers and birds. Here, Mabel's grandmother teaches her that she is a part of nature, and it is her job to take care of it.

The NCAA women's tournament selection committee has never let an opportunity for rematch, rehash, or reunion pass them by. When the bracket was released on Sunday, it was no surprise to see a rather cinematic Elite Eight meeting set up in the Fort Worth 1 region, something in the vein of Obi-Wan vs. Darth Vader. The circle is now complete.  When former Huskies point guard Shea Ralph left UConn's bench in 2021 after 13 seasons as Geno Auriemma's assistant, she was but the learner. Now she is the master. Her second-seeded Vanderbilt Commodores, ranked No. 6 in the AP polls, set school records for regular-season and SEC wins this year. They were the darling of the conference award ballots. Ralph won SEC Coach of the Year, and her young starting backcourt got some shine, too: Sophomore scorer Mikayla Blakes won SEC Player of the Year and point guard Aubrey Galvan was named SEC Freshman of the Year.  Well before the bracket announcement, the two coaches had been pulled onto the same campaign trail by the star sophomores at the helm of each team. Blakes is a daring and speedy guard who moves with a kind of wobbly endurance, like her long limbs are coming unscrewed from the rest of her body. (Her whistle, in some games, is astonishing.) Galvan's presence this year has let Blakes focus on what she does best: catch, get set, and shoot in a single motion. Coupled with the fact that she’s one of the better off-ball movers in college basketball, she gets great shots off with ease.

A 12 seed upsetting a 5 seed is not the most unexpected NCAA tournament result, and yet it can still offer a chance to partake in one of March's most pleasurable traditions: learning about a school and program that 95 percent of viewers had never heard of prior to tip-off. Sometimes this process leads to charming discoveries (Florida Gulf Coast University's campus lake) and sometimes it doesn't (Oral Roberts University's whole deal). No. 12 High Point University prevailed over No. 5 Wisconsin, 83-82, on the first day of the tournament, which means it's time to learn about a school. HPU is a private Methodist university located in North Carolina. The basketball team won the Big South this year with a 31-4 record, and beat Winthrop in the conference championship game by 15 points. They've also got what every memorable tournament underdog needs: a quirky gimmick player. That would be senior guard Chase Johnston, who comes in off the bench and does nothing but attempt and hit threes at a ludicrous rate. I mean that literally: Johnston played 12 minutes per game this season and 138 of his 143 field goal attempts came from behind the arc, where he shot 49 percent. The fun little grace note here is that he hit the game-winning shot for High Point on Thursday, and it was his first two-point make of the season: https://youtu.be/aehwW9NSmwk?t=154

As my variously diseased sports-watching habits go, my fondness for college basketball feels like the most disreputable. The Mets are a family thing. West Coast MLB and NBA games, between teams I don't care about, are mostly about proving that I am allowed to stay up as late as I want. Choosing to watch the Horizon League semifinals, on the other hand, is just very difficult to excuse. I'm not gambling on it, and I'm not even expecting it to impact my bracket in any meaningful way. I could claim that I am just doing enough so I don't embarrass myself for our annual visit from the college basketball data maven and all-around titan Ken Pomeroy for a March Madness episode. But I know that's not it. I am just failing the marshmallow test, over and over, for the entire month of March, every year. I am fine with this, by the way. I greatly enjoyed Ken's visit on this week's episode. I still didn't know what I was talking about, but it was fun to ask general questions of a real expert and get detailed and informed answers in return. While we talked about this year's men's tournament bracket and the unusually top-heavy crop of title contenders, we also talked about the stuff that will actually make the tournament fun to watch: the surprisingly varied styles of the teams that have been out ahead of the field all year, what a good college basketball roster looks like in this weird moment in the sport, how the transfer market actually works and why, and what has happened to the 5-12 upset.

What's the difference between betting on sports and "trading on a prediction market?" For the gambler herself, very little. If you go on Kalshi, the suddenly ubiquitous "prediction market" platform that has enjoyed the backing of the Trump administration, one can click on the "sports" tab and see a list of, among other events, all the college basketball games being played today. One can "buy shares" in, say, Kennesaw State to beat Gonzaga, and if that result happens, she will collect profit from the money "invested" by the losers. Kalshi, with a straight face, argues that this is different from traditional sportsbook betting because they are a neutral party simply charging transaction fees, instead of a bookmaker charging a vig. But if you define sports gambling as "risking money on a sporting event in the hopes of making more money," all the synonyms in the world can't hide that. The state of Arizona sees it this way, too. This week, the AG of the Copper State became the first to file criminal charges against Kalshi for running an illegal gambling operation. Their argument quite simply amounts to "You can gamble on Kalshi," with the lawsuit detailing 20 straightforward instances of various bets on sports and elections accepted by the platform. That you can bet on any world event besides sports on these things opens up a whole other kind of hell, but for today let's keep the focus limited to sports. On Thursday, MLB announced that it is partnering with Polymarket, a Kalshi competitor prepping for a full-scale U.S. launch, to make them "MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange." The deal gives Polymarket the right to use MLB's IP and data, and it supposedly gives the league some power to put restrictions on certain kinds of bets that would be especially vulnerable to insider trading, like individual pitches and manager decisions. As of this writing, MLB's press release refers to this as an "iintegrity framework" [sic].

Nothing But Respect is a little late this week, due to a small error that I explain here at the opening of the episode. We had Tyler Parker of The Ringer on this week, because he's an Oklahoma City Thunder fan, and after several of our most recent guests have teed off on OKC, we thought it would be a good idea to get a Thunder partisan on the podcast to talk about what it's like to be the villain. Harry also conducted extensive research into the guys who were responsible for defending Wilt Chamberlain in his 100-point game. It should be noted that this episode contains discussion of Charlie Brown Jr.

This week we are launching The Span, Defector’s first and only culture newsletter. Every other week, we will collect the best non-sports writing from Defector so that you won’t miss anything, and also let you in on what we’ve been reading elsewhere. Like the Culture section itself, this newsletter will be driven entirely by our…

A lot of folks don't like the NHL's current playoff format, which tries its best to sequester teams within their own divisions for the first two rounds before matching up the winners in the conference final. The goal is to deliver more rivalries and repeat matchups in the early stages, which is noble (unless you're a Kings fan). But it can look kind of ridiculous in a case like this year's Western Conference, where the Anaheim Ducks lead the Pacific Division but would sit a distant fourth if they were moved into the Central. As it stands, the three best teams in the West—the Avalanche, Stars, and Wild—will have to fight it out amongst themselves. And then the conference final would begin. This isn't exactly fair to the best teams. But here's a counterargument: I am very impatient to see the Central's terrible trio face each other in best-of-sevens, and the NHL will not make me wait. In the three games that have involved these three teams this month—Stars-Avs, Avs-Wild, Stars-Avs again—fans have been exclusively treated to overtime stalemates that needed shootouts to determine a winner, and thus have no predictive relevance for the eternal OT of the postseason. On March 6, it was the Avalanche who scored an equalizer with 15 seconds left in the third and eventually stole the extra point. A few days later, with yours truly in attendance, Minnesota and Colorado played to their full potential with a 3-2 Avs win that had fans on the edges of their seats for over 65 minutes of action. And on Wednesday, with the Stars traveling to Denver in a contest of teams trying to avoid third-place Minnesota in the opening round, it was second-place Dallas who gained a point on the Avs with a 2-1 win that, once again, required a post-OT tiebreak.