NowLoop

“Grogu is dead. Grogu remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this dead too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Grogus simply to appear worthy of it?” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (paraphrased) The reviews are in, and Grogu is dead. His movie, anyway. The toyetic little critter popularly known as “Baby Yoda” co-stars with Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Grogu. A theatrical spinoff of a Star Wars television show, one that way fewer people watched than any given Star Wars movie, was always going to be a heavy lift. By most accounts, director Jon Favreau and his co-writer, Disney Star Wars honcho Dave Filoni, have dropped it like Luke Skywalker trying to levitate his X-Wing. 

The Colorado Avalanche are not an easy team to root for. They are a deep, übercapable team with few weaknesses. Their star scorer is a weirdo but not in a particularly endearing way. They have their Cup already. In any other year, in any other matchup, I'd be pulling for someone else to have their turn. But in this Western Conference Final, the Avs might as well be Team North America, for all the hopes and goodwill of the hockey world they're carrying. Over the next week or two, I want very badly for them to kick the Golden Knights in their golden nuts. I'm not sure if a professional sports franchise can be ontologically evil, but if one can I know which one it is. This is not, as Vegas fans insist, a matter of pure envy because they keep winning. Or at least it's mostly not that. Sure, the Knights have been immutably successful over their limited existence, and no, their loyal supporters have yet to pay the Suck Tax, which is what truly bonds fandom. But lots of teams win. Few do it with such mustache-twirling cartoon villainy. Even without their track record of circumvention and cutthroatery they're remarkably despicable at the moment, in ways ranging from the odious to the petty. They signed Carter Hart, who was cleared of criminal charges but not his actual actions in the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal, when no other team would, and of course he's thriving as their starting goaltender. Following their second-round clinch, they refused to speak to the media over some imagined slight or other, drawing a startlingly robust penalty from the NHL that was clearly a reward for their collective body of asshole work. They're currently denying their former coach Bruce Cassidy permission to interview for another job after they fired him in March, a move pretty much without precedent and which has drawn the ire of the NHL Coaches’ Association. If It would do any good I would emphasize the hypocrisy involved, given that their current coach, bespectacled grump John Tortorella, was that hated media until just two months ago, and was only able to guide the Knights to the playoffs because his last team gave him the permission to interview. But accusations of hypocrisy carry no weight against unrepetant scoundrels.

The post-retirement track record for your hyper-competitive, multiple-champion GOAT-class athletes is not necessarily one you'd want for yourself. So often they seem stranded, often surrounded but generally quite alone, peering down from atop a mile-high butte of money and notoriety at a world that is much too far away to recognize; the people moving through and within it, to the extent they are visible at all, have a busy and eminently squashable ant-like aspect. We can probably assume that we look roughly as strange and unreal to them as they do to us. There is something alien about this type of person that goes beyond their superhuman and highly public accomplishments, and that is true even before wealth and fame shove them further and further into abstraction. That otherness is sort of spiritually hypertrophic, in the way that tennis players tend to have one really strong arm and one comparatively normal one, but mostly just a reflection of how lopsided this sort of lifetime spent in relentless pursuit tends to leave one's being. As any/every sports biography or feature profile can tell you, this is just What It Takes. Everything combustible enough to serve that all-consuming pursuit gets consumed; it becomes fuel, and things that might be necessary later in life are chucked into the furnace in the moment to keep the engine stoked and burning. The more distance that time puts between these champions and their old glories, the more that deficit tends to come into relief. There's a type of feature story about this, too, and it's common enough to be a sort of genre unto itself. Sometimes the dramatic action is someone who has burned what these people burn wondering where everything went; think of Michael Jordan telling Wright Thompson, in 2013, "I drove myself so much that I'm still living with some of those drives. I'm living with that. I don't know how to get rid of it. I don't know if I could." Sometimes, usually but not always in instances that require writing around an uncooperative subject, that incapacity for insight is the story. Think of Tiger Woods clearing rooms in a Navy SEAL "Kill House" training facility and wrecking his body in an attempt to better understand his domineering and rapacious military father, also in a Wright Thompson story. Steve Kerr, a much more enlightened and insightful being than Jordan or Woods, presents a different version of this protagonist in a much more recent Wright Thompson story, one who is trying to figure out what his existence might be like without the old rhythm of competition and camaraderie, and with nothing but his own very full life to fill it.

When I first read that Daniel Radcliffe would be doing Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway, I didn't think it would work. It's not that I was worried about Radcliffe, who besides his film and TV career has established himself as a bona fide stage entertainer. I was worried about everybody else in the theater, because this play runs on audience participation. For Radcliffe in particular I imagined it could be like navigating a minefield, especially in a show about depression and suicide. Every description I've heard or read about him involves the word "charming" somewhere in there, but he's also someone I associate with intense scrutiny and obsessive fandom, thanks to the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. For example, someone who worked at a theater where Radcliffe had previously performed once told me that they had to hire extra security so people didn't break into his dressing room. With the Hudson Theatre holding just under 1,000, the odds didn't seem good that everyone who attended on a nightly basis would demonstrate polite behavior when Radcliffe crossed the traditional divide between audience and performer. But if anyone's been a total weirdo at Every Brilliant Thing, I haven't heard about it. And when I attended the show, now a couple months into its run, I was impressed both by the overall chill of my fellow theatergoers and the way the audience participation transcended its potential for gimmickry to become something that genuinely worked in the context of the play. There are certainly Broadway shows with more action and more developed writing, but the pieces of Every Brilliant Thing, orchestrated by Radcliffe, fit together to form an experience that justifies the leap of faith required to perform or attend it. In any venue, with any level of celebrity in the cast, breaking the fourth wall is a tricky endeavor—I know several people who are terrified by the idea that an actor may "call on them." If that's you, you'll want to sit in the balcony, because the overwhelming majority of audience participation is sourced from the seats closest to (or actually on) the stage. But a lucky few from up high get to shout something out when cued, and in order to prepare them for their moment, Radcliffe does travel upstairs before the formal start time. As I was taking my own seat in the balcony about 10 minutes before the top of the hour, I was delightfully surprised to encounter him delivering instructions to someone sitting just a few rows ahead. The average audience member looked a lot like me—women in the rough age cohort where it was once actually normal and fine to really love Harry Potter—but I was quite impressed that nobody moved to get closer to him or interrupted his task. I personally couldn't resist snapping a photo, and of course folks were staring at the star of the show. But if you swapped Radcliffe out with a very handsome usher, the scene would have looked just about the same.

All season, you could hear the complaints. Arsenal is boring. Arsenal's exclusive source of goals is the corner kick, which they treat as something between an offensive-rebounding exercise and a defensive line trying to get the quarterback. Arsenal is lucky, living free and easy thanks to down years from the other big clubs, who otherwise would have mounted stiffer challenges. Arsenal plays ugly, cynical anti-soccer, an aesthetic betrayal of the man who made the modern Arsenal. Arsenal is unworthy, barely scraping past the worst teams in the league instead of blasting them to hell. Arsenal is the apotheosis of all the worst trends in the game, a club by center backs, for center backs, dedicated to squeezing the very heart out of the game as part of a cold, rationalist approach. There's no match Arsenal won't try to win 1-0, no attacker Mikel Arteta won't try to coach the joy and creativity out of, no spontaneity the club won't kill. I found some of these points reasonably valid and some of the defenses offered by Arsenal supporters thin. But more than anything, I found the whole exercise pointless. Both complaints about the supposedly ugly soccer played by the Premier League champions and attempts to defend it on the merits assume that the title carries with it some sort of moral weight, as if a champion has to justify themselves on something other than competitive grounds. The point is not to play beautiful soccer, to win hearts and minds, or to prove the doubters wrong. The point is to win. A title justifies itself. After 22 years, a botched transition out of the Arsène Wenger era, several full cycles of promising young players' ultimately title-free careers, and three consecutive, variously agonizing second-place finishes, the Gunners are now champions of the Premier League. That's all that matters.

One of the strangest tales in Icelandic folklore concerns a creature called the Loðsilungur, or the furry trout. The trout, as you might imagine, looks like a fish covered with a white shag of fur, which it allegedly evolved to stay warm in Nordic waters. The people of Iceland, especially the men, knew not to eat the furry trout. If a man did eat a furry trout, he would suffer the unfortunate fate of becoming pregnant and delivering the child through his split scrotum. In the early 1900s, the legend of the furry trout somehow migrated to the United States, where various humorists assembled and mounted furry trouts to gift to unaware museums, a prank that, I think, stands the test of time. There is of course no such thing as a furry trout, in Iceland or America. But now a country famous for its development of some of the most ridiculous, bizarre, and frankly alarming animals has stepped in with a furry trout of its own. The fish in question is a new species of ghost pipefish called Solenostomus snuffleupagus, named for Sesame Street's Mr. Snuffleupagus, which it resembles quite closely. (One can only imagine how a Philadelphia-based marine biologist might have risen to this naming occasion.) The scientists who described S. snuffleupagus gave it the common name of the hairy ghost pipefish, according to a paper in The Journal of Fish Biology. This fish lives in waters off Australia, which might be the world's most consistently excellent producer of strange animals, such as the platypus and the cassowary. But even by Australian standards, this fish looks crazy.

After 26 days of gameplay and almost three months of real time spent arguing and crashing out online, Survivor 50 has finally arrived at its endgame. From a starting count of 24 iconic (and, well, "iconic") players down to a Final Five, the supersized season has been ... let's call it "polarizing." At its best, Season 50 was a real celebration of Survivor lore and 26 years of characters: The premiere was wonderful, the emotions on exhibit—particularly from the players who know this is their last chance to play this incredible game—were raw and touching, and it has been pretty reliably funny! This is all good. Unfortunately, it has not all been good. At its worst, Season 50 has been a demoralizing harbinger of what Survivor is becoming as it inches closer to whatever endgame it has in mind for itself. More than any already-twist-heavy New Era season, Season 50 was a disaster of production interference, and the celebrity cameos that made my blood run cold in the season's trailer didn't help matters. (Christian truly did have his fate decided in the game by Jimmy fucking Fallon.) The game became less about who could navigate the tumultuous relationships of a lunatic tribe and more about who could get fucked over the least by twists, advantages, and whatever Jeff Probst thinks makes for Good Survivor Content. Figuring that out has been a grim exercise for fans; this Variety interview with Probst ahead of the finale is worth a read to see how out-of-touch he is with the game he has become inextricably intertwined with over the last quarter century. But! There's still a finale to be watched, and though our Defector Survivor Jury (Luis Paez-Pumar, Kelsey McKinney, Alex Sujong Laughlin, and Normal Gossip producer Jae Towle Vieira) appear to be united in expecting no surprises from the final episode of Season 50, a Survivor finale is a Survivor finale. And, thanks to the one fan vote this season that hit on the correct result, there's a live finale for 50. It'll be fun to see everyone glammed up and in the same place again for the first time since the opening beach scene way back in the first episode.

When I was 24, a stranger on the internet called me a white man, and it sent me into such a tailspin that I changed my byline. Before then, I was going by “Alex Laughlin,” just my first and last name. I had started writing about race, and I’d made a podcast about multiracial identity called Other, but if my name was to represent me on its own, there was no way for a stranger to know that very special fact that seemed like it defined me exclusively: I was Wasian. My Korean name is 수정, which is most often romanized as Soo-Jeong or Soo-Jung. No one has ever called me this. But in 2017, I decided to adopt it as part of my professional identity, as a way to signal my mixed ethnicity to strangers. However, when I tried to add my name to my Twitter account, I found that the standard spelling was too lengthy to fit with my long-ass last name. In order to squeeze my name into my Twitter header, I took some liberties, and for the last decade, my byline has essentially been a misspelling of my own name. It was more intolerable to be perceived imprecisely by a stranger than it was for me to commit to being perceived as what I imagine is the “Ashleigh” of Korean name spellings. It was these awkward attempts at self-expression that defined my long path to moderately well-adjusted Wasian adult, and I recognize my younger self with a bit of affectionate cringe when I see fellow Wasians insisting on their identities in loud, public ways. I used to make a big deal out of every time someone asked me “What are you?” I used to have my feelings hurt when the servers in Korean restaurants brought my food with a fork. Now, however, I am more preoccupied with simply living a good life—I went to a Korean restaurant last night and smiled while the server explained tteokbokki to me. I want to offer my elder wisdom to this younger generation of Wasians. But I cannot and should not interfere. As they say on the internet: It’s a canon event. 

As a rule, a college graduation is a miserable affair. If you’re an outgoing senior, you have wait around for hours on end in the sweltering heat, all while hungover and wearing a full-length black gown. If you’re a parent, you have to sit in a folding chair in the middle of a lawn for the same amount of time, seething about how you had to park your car so far away from everything. Everyone in attendance just wants to get to the roll call, and even that part is torture because, even if your last name starts with an A, they still make you stay in your seat until Zachary Zzyrowitz receives the final diploma. But before you get to that roll call, you must endure an endless procession of deans introducing other deans, students who aren’t your kid receiving prestigious awards, and, worst of all, the keynote speaker. Let’s see what kind of sage wisdom this year’s crop of speakers had for tomorrow’s leaders! https://bsky.app/profile/cabel.panic.com/post/3mlk75u3om22e

Can you call a team that has advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals "unserious"? I'm honestly not sure, but it's very difficult to find another descriptor for the Cleveland Cavaliers the morning after they blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 1 against the Knicks. It's not just that they blew it, but how they blew it. The Knicks won Tuesday's game in overtime, 115-104, while playing about 16 total minutes of good basketball. Both teams started terribly, but New York led 23-16 after the first quarter. From that point until the 7:39 mark of the fourth quarter, the Cavs outscored the Knicks, 77-48. I can see you doing some quick math in your head, and yes, it's true: That means that for the rest of the game, the Cavs got beat 44-11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg2MDj-I1vc