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Of all possible beef pairings among NBA players, Luka Doncic vs. Goga Bitadze is one of the most likely of units to get into a scuffle. When Doncic is not racking up technical fouls for yelling at the referees, he is racking up technical fouls for talking impish trash to players, fans, and really anyone who looks at him funny. Bitadze, meanwhile, is a gleeful enforcer who also mixes it up with opponents when he senses any of his smaller teammates have been insulted. He also famously got into a fight with a Pacers assistant during a game in 2021, which was probably more on the coach, but still, this guy will beef. Which is to say: it is not surprising that Doncic and Bitadze got into it on Saturday. Late in the third quarter, Bitadze fouled Doncic on the perimeter, sending him to the free-throw line and kicking off a shit-talking session. As they went down the court, Doncic got into the big Georgian's face, prompting a double technical. This is Doncic's 16th technical of the season, which triggers an automatic one-game suspension. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFpGfI1fUPk

Take a look at Giants running back Cam Skattebo and one thing becomes immediately clear: If he wasn't a football player he would be spending a significant amount of time menacing Sacramento-area gas station cashiers for not carrying "the good Monsters." Another truth follows naturally from this one: If any NFL player were to go on a podcast and say that CTE and asthma are not real, it would be Skattebo. That is exactly what Skattebo did on a recent episode of the Bring The Juice podcast. "Do you think CTE is a real thing?" asked host Frank Dalena, who did not record a single statistic while playing wide receiver for three years at Fresno State. "No, it's an excuse," responded Skattebo. Dalena and Skattebo then agreed that asthma is also fake, at which point Dalena laid out a highly relatable scenario: "Is there anything worse than when you're in fourth grade and someone's huffin' and puffin'? You're just soft."I hadn't really thought about it before, but I think we are all forced to agree that there really isn't anything worse than being in fourth grade while someone's huffin' and puffin'.

Do you remember when Barbra Banda scored a goal on her birthday to tie up Orlando’s match against Denver? How about when Emma Sears ran the length of the pitch with the ball at her feet to put Louisville up 2-0 on Washington? Or when the Spirit came back to tie it up with a Sofia Cantore scorcher and a Leicy Santos snipe?  Of course you don’t. That’s because the Cascadia Rivalry happened.  Friday’s edition of the NWSL’s most storied rivalry—and arguably its only true rivalry, as the manufactured “District vs. Empire” clash between Washington and Gotham has only just started to grow real teeth over the last couple seasons—had an air of the bizarre before the season even started. It was oddly set for just the second week of the season, and would be Portland’s home opener. 

Here is a loose rule that you can use to determine whether or not Tadej Pogacar is going to win a bike race: if you can see the flank of an asscheek protruding through his tattered skinsuit, nobody is beating him. One year after winning Strade Bianche with his butt flapping in the wind following a heavy crash on a descent, Pogacar again fell hard just before the business end of Milan-San Remo on Saturday. The Slovenian world-conqueror was deep into his second attempt at winning La Classicissima when he went down at what felt like the worst possible time, mere kilometers away from the foot of the Cipressa. The race's penultimate climb was the springboard from which he and Mathieu van der Poel launched their winning move last year, and it was once again the lynchpin of his team's strategy. With his left flank spangled with gore, could Pogacar recover in time to make a move? Would he even have the juice to make such a move stick? Absolutely, yes. Pogacar won in a photo-finish sprint against Tom Pidcock on the Via Roma, after six-and-a-half hours of racing. He has now won four of the five Monument classics, not to mention almost every single other moderately significant race in the sport. Tadej Pogacar has nearly completed cycling at age 27, though unlike so many of his previous classics wins, this was no procession. Pogacar had to scrap for his place in history.

Arkansas point guard Darius Acuff Jr. will be selected near the very top of this summer's NBA draft. He will be a boon to any team in need of a crafty, athletic, classically trained point guard. If there's any knock on his pro prospects, it's his size: he's just short enough to profile as a defensive liability, and these days even the most skilled guards can get bullied out of games by beefy perimeter defenders. And indeed, Acuff's size was a bit of a problem in Saturday night's 94-88 win over 12-seeded High Point University, but in a way it probably never will be again. He was a little too big. That's because Acuff, who led his team with 36 points on 50 percent shooting, was matched up with Rob Martin. High Point's point guard is listed at 5-foot-11 and 170 lbs., and was one of several HPU players who looked like they had wandered into the wrong gym. The physical disparity ended up mattering not at all—High Point gave their 4-seeded opponents all they could handle, and at times even looked like the most likely to win the game. The Panthers led at multiple times in the second half, and the game was tied at 83 with just over three minutes to play. It took a personal 7-0 run from Acuff to put the game away once and for all, but before this became Acuff's game, it was Martin's. It was his driving layup that tied the game at 83, and he finished with 30 points on 11-of-23 shooting. How does a 5-foot-10 guy score 30 against a team that only started one player under 6-foot-5? You only have to watch Martin for a few possessions in order to stop feeling sympathy over his stature. That's because it doesn't take long to realize that Martin might actually be the most athletically gifted player on the floor. He has a first step that flash-freezes any defender unlucky enough to be in front of him, enough straight-line speed to shrink the court, and an ability to manipulate the ball and change direction without ever having to decelerate. This makes him the perfect point guard to lead High Point's sped-up, bombs-away offense—the Panthers shot 22 more threes than Arkansas—and all that speed was almost enough to engineer another upset.

Taylor Frankie Paul was supposed to save The Bachelorette. The show's viewership has been in a steady decline for almost a decade, dropping from about 10 million viewers in 2010 to just under 3 million in its most recent season. The Bachelor, too, has been in a ratings freefall, and so the tried-and-true method for the franchise of plucking a girl from one show and making her the star of the other was no longer enough. The show needed more eyeballs, more attention, more headlines, if it wanted to turn things around. So for the first time in 22 seasons, they cast a lead who was already famous, just from something else. And for Paul, this was a chance to break from the ensemble of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and carry a reality TV show all on her own. On Thursday, three days before the Bachelorette season was set to premiere, TMZ released a video from 2023, filmed by Paul's ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. In the video, shot on a phone, Paul and Mortensen scream at each other. "This is called physical abuse," Mortensen can be heard saying before the three-minute video escalates. Paul rushes at him, throwing her arms out as if to hit him. He fends her off, and then she picks up a metal barstool from under the counter and flings it at him. Then she throws another, and another. Her daughter, who is sitting on the couch between them, is hit by the edge of one of the stools and begins to cry. The video ends with Mortensen demanding that Paul go help her child. It is a gut-wrenching video of domestic violence, and in the wake of its release, the ABC network announced in a statement that it had "made the decision to not move forward with the new season" of The Bachelorette, "in light of the newly released video just surfaced.” It seems like a necessary and reasonable response to an awful situation, except that ABC and everyone else already knew about this incident. It was originally reported in 2023. There was a court case. Hulu, which is owned by Disney just like ABC, aired bodycam footage from the police officers who arrived on that scene during Season 1 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where the incident was openly acknowledged by the whole cast. So the real question is how we got within three days of this season of The Bachelorette airing in the first place.

At this point, Aston Martin's continued crisis seems like it cannot possibly worsen, which is why the team, just two races into the Formula 1 season, is restructuring upper management. There were reports on Thursday that Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey would step down from his position to focus on the technical elements of the car, with Audi team principal Jonathan Wheatley being Aston Martin's first choice to step into the position. Less than 24 hours after both teams issued statements of non-denial, Audi confirmed that Wheatley would be leaving the team, with immediate effect, for "personal reasons." It is true that money and proximity to home (Audi is based in Switzerland, while Aston Martin is based in Wheatley's native England) can classify as personal reasons, though Aston Martin has yet to officially confirm Wheatley's appointment. "Disastrous" is already a generous descriptor for the current state of Aston Martin. For the viewing public and driver Fernando Alonso—now on his second round of being terrorized by Honda engines, after a nightmare stint at McLaren from 2015 to 2018—the fact that the team, and billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll, have poached Wheatley away from another organization can shed either a positive or even more negative light on the situation. Taken negatively, the car, which already appears to be undriveable, must really be abysmal for team leadership to be pressing the panic button so soon, and so aggressively. Wheatley only started at Audi in 2025, and will not undergo the customary gardening leave between jobs; the amount of money required to tempt Wheatley away from a comfortable position, to get him to step immediately into a catastrophic scenario, and to convince Audi to release him from his duties, is no doubt eye-watering. Whether an upgrade to the team principal position stands any chance of resolving the team's fundamental and most urgent problem—a car and engine package that do not work—is unclear.

As recently as last week I was telling you that the 19-year-old phenomenon Joao Fonseca might be the true threat to the Sinner-Alcaraz regime atop men's tennis. And he will get a chance to play Alcaraz this very evening. But what if Fonseca is actually old and washed with a bad back, and the real contender is an even younger player? That is the hypothetical we can briefly entertain today, having just seen two buzzy teenagers win first-round matches at the Miami Open, one of them in historic fashion. Moise Kouame, born in 2009, which hurts to type, drew me in last month with his performance in Montpellier. The Frenchman became, at age 16, one of the youngest players since 2000 to qualify for the main draw of an ATP tournament. More than the achievement on paper, I was struck by his clear identity on court: a baseline solidity and ability to generate abrupt pace that I associate with Sinner or Novak Djokovic. Already his game looked spookily professional, and flaws—the serve, conditioning—were the kind that sort themselves out in time, especially taking into account his 6-foot-3 stature. At the time, I wrote that he could be competitive at the Challenger level by year's end, which would've been a great feat in itself. Just a few weeks later, he made it to a Challenger semifinal, and just a few weeks after that, he won at much higher level altogether. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTTEvab4qSo

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 James's contract and stature let the Lakers really build the team around their prize from the Nico Harrison boondoggle.