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Ryan Garcia spent most of the last few years sabotaging his fight career. He smoked, drank and drugged during training. He went on a bizarre spree of bad behavior, lowlighted by a series of racist posts sent out to his many million social media followers, earning sanctions from boxing industry powerhouses. While creating such a sad stir outside the ring, he became a boring fighter and a loser inside it. He went down without a fight against Rolly Romero in a Times Square fiasco last spring, a bout that was supposed to reintroduce him as a viable world title contender, and before this weekend had notched only one official win in the last four years, discounting his non-decision over Devin Haney thanks to a banned substance found in his post-fight pee-pee test.  Then, on Saturday night, Garcia threw and landed a big right hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdM2Hg2VWQ

One defining feature of the second Trump administration is the bewildering juxtaposition between various job titles and the people who actually fill those positions. "FBI Director" evokes a commanding presence: someone tall, obviously cunning, and more than a little bit evil. I don't think you would visualize a little weirdo who looks like he has only ever entered a room by accident. Current FBI Director Kash Patel is precisely that kind of little weirdo. He looked just as uncomfortable and out of place as he always does when he showed up in the Team USA locker room Sunday, to holler, drink beers, and enjoy Toby Keith's music with the players who had just won a gold medal by defeating Canada 2-1 in overtime. https://twitter.com/WilliamTurton/status/2025716894636929264

As the number of powerful, wealthy people revealed to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein increases, so too does the coherence of their collective excuse: They only knew Epstein as a genius of math and science, a polymath who could dispense tax advice worth hundreds of millions of dollars, opine on quantum entanglement, and offer wise counsel on how to navigate choppy political and social waters. They were not sending obsequious emails to Epstein in his capacity as a conduit for shady money, world-historic sex criminal or, uh, shadow representative of Israel. They were simply seeking his considerable breadth and depth of knowledge. Both the content and style of Epstein's emails undermine the claim of his genius. Check out this excerpt from an incredibly weird, rambling email he sent to powerful crisis PR guy Matthew Hiltzik in 2017: looling into , can the music produced by the brain give us an insight into how it works. . different cultures have different music. german music is stiff. rigid on the beat. afrom americans flecible ie JAZZ.

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelsey Dixon and Alex Boisvert, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Alex is a crossword constructor from California who is so uncomfortable writing anything positive about himself that he wanted to do a goofy bio. Kelsey is a gorgeous and brilliant crossword constructor from Chicago who is not plagued by this affliction. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.

So you're wondering one day later if the final Olympic event ended fairly, and we're here to tell you that it did. Sweden beat Switzerland in the women's curling final, and there’s no disputing it. But for those of you who stream and have mastered the difference between "live" and "not live," the actual final event was the men's hockey final, and you can ask the same question, as many Canadians are doing even as we speak. Was the U.S.'s 2-1 overtime victory the “right” outcome, and of course the answer to that is no. The overtime lasted only 101 seconds, which was an outrage against all living things. The score, though, was hockey through and through, because the first rule of hockey has always been "my hot goalie beats whatever you've got." The Canadians had the run of play almost throughout the day, but they didn't have Connor Hellebuyck, the U.S. goalie and industrial refrigerator impersonator who kept the faster, craftier and more attack-driven Canadians at stick length for most of the game, though sometimes only at paddle length. 

As Cardte Hicks leapt toward the hoop, the audience at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium suddenly hushed. These were the final minutes of the Women’s Professional Basketball League’s All-Star Game on Feb. 9, 1981, where an undersized squad from the West was blowing out the favored East team in what would be a 125-92 win. The arena grew rowdier as the quick sharpshooters of the West racked up points, but when Hicks alone flew above the rim, the crowd went silent. Hicks, a 25-year-old All-Star from the San Francisco Pioneers, was unlike any other player on the court. At 5-foot-9, listed in some places as 5-foot-8, her vertical leap was reported as high as 36 inches. Word of her talent had spread across the WBL, the tale growing taller. “She’s up there so long, she can dial a telephone number,” Pioneers teammate Roberta Williams would tell me decades later. “Say hello, and before the conversation’s over, say goodbye … I never saw a female who had the kind of hang time she had.” With the clock winding down, this gave West head coach Greg Williams the idea to encourage Hicks to try something she’d never done in a WBL game before: attempt a dunk. “She was such a graceful athlete,” he remembered. “Almost poetry in motion.” The coach had total confidence in her abilities. “You go up there and play the way you wanna play—just shake ‘em!” she recalled him saying. Hicks, known for her impressive vertical and magnetic charisma, was more than ready.

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 biathlon 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, 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxI7uJp3TQM Taking notes on this game was like trying to 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 Madison Chock and Evan 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