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Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran Saturday morning, bombing several cities in the country. As a result, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, his death confirmed by state media Sunday. Also included in the casualties were reportedly dozens of children at a girls' school. Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, said that more than 100 children were killed at the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyiba school in the city of Minab. The school was located near an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base. Via the Washington Post, photos and videos showed rescue workers digging through the rubble and backpacks covered in dust and blood. One video showed a man holding up a severed arm. A spokesperson for United States Central Command said it was looking into the reports. In an article published Saturday, Drop Site spoke to some of the parents of the victims:

At Defector, we like weird sports eaters. The demands of elite performance encourage monomania, which is expressed by your various sports freaks as often inviolable, occasionally bizarre food restrictions. Even sports commentators and hot-takers get in on it: Skip Bayless famously eats nothing but sauceless chicken and broccoli, ordered in five-day batches; Jim Nantz religiously throws away the final bite of each halftime hot dog he's ordered as an NFL broadcaster; and Don Cherry took a midday boost from salmon-and-mayo sandwiches ritually aged to a consistency once described by Ron MacLean as "more like a pudding." A true grinder will do profoundly gut-busting things in order to survive and thrive at the upper echelons of North American sports. For pitcher Ryan Lambert, who is presently working his way up the Mets farm system, this means eating like a champion. A champion mongoose. A mongoose who has discovered a nest full of plover eggs—several, in fact. A mongoose who raids half a dozen nests full of eggs every waking day of their life. Per a report from Anthony DiComo of MLB.com, Lambert "came across an internet video" two years ago, and took from it the message that he should consume 30 raw eggs per day. "Day 1, it was an adjustment for sure. But I’m not a chicken," Lambert told DiComo, presumably by way of heading off any accusations of cannibalism. "I like a little adversity and challenge. It kind of gets me going." Lambert's commitment to dietary excellence means eating a grilled steak and sweet potato dinner "most days." In a ritual that I am sure makes him extremely popular with his colleagues, Lambert will reportedly sometimes wander the clubhouse dining room "to examine his teammates' plates for nutritional value," poking at them for succumbing to temptation. According to DiComo, last year Lambert ordered "a bowl of chicken hearts" while eating with a teammate in a restaurant.

Lu Dort is often finding new ways to do some bullshit just on the edge of the accepted rules of basketball. The difference this weekend was that the Oklahoma City Thunder wing went too far and got caught for it, even though that didn't stop his team from playing the victim. In the fourth quarter of Friday's game, Dort stuck out his leg to trip Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic after the inbound pass. An official called a foul on the play, but while Dort acted like he was wrongly accused, an incensed Jokic popped up and got in his face. Dort's teammate Jaylin Williams stepped in, and he and a still-fuming Jokic grappled as players and coaches attempted to separate them. Isaiah Joe was there, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otvGEQF0VXk

Kristaps Porzingis is out indefinitely due to illness, according to Golden State's injury report. What illness? That question is the subject of some controversy. Porzingis has been broadly unwell since the spring of 2025, when he was with the Boston Celtics and found himself suffering from extreme exhaustion toward the end of the regular season. Boston was bounced in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season, Porzingis was a shell of himself, and over the summer he was diagnosed by doctors with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. A key part of that sentence is "by doctors." According to Fred Katz of The Athletic, who reported on Porzingis's condition this past October, it was doctors who made the diagnosis, and it was doctors who outlined diet and lifestyle practices for managing the condition. His season so far has been rough: With the Atlanta Hawks, Porzingis played just 17 of 53 games, and while his production was respectable, he was limited to a career-low 24 minutes per game. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr seems to have his own sources for gathering medical information. In an interview with local radio Friday evening, he described his process. "When I heard about the trade, I read about the POTS diagnosis," said Kerr, who probably does not have a medical library and was almost certainly typing shit into an internet browser. For more information, Kerr called Onsi Saleh, the former Warriors vice president who's presently the general manager of the Hawks, the franchise that was at that moment in the process of trading Porzingis to the Warriors. "He's a good friend of mine and I said 'Is this POTS story real?' And he said, 'It’s actually not POTS.' That was some misinformation that was out there. I don’t know if anybody’s asked him about it."

It is once again time to have a staff chat. We'll be hanging out in the comments, ready to answer whatever questions you have. Update (3:17 p.m. ET): OK we're wrapping up here! Thanks for joining, everyone.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.  The testimony was part of a bellwether trial in California in which a 20-year-old woman, referred to in the trial as K.G.M., or "Kaley," alleges that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive and that her addiction to Instagram and YouTube specifically contributed to the degradation of her mental health. Meta's lawyers argue that the mental health problems she suffered as an adolescent were caused by separate trauma and abuse. So far, the trial has hinged mainly on the question of whether social-media addiction is possible, from a psychiatric perspective. Meta is arguing that there is a difference between "problematic" and "clinically addictive" usage, and that the company and Zuckerberg are not responsible for negative mental health outcomes produced or exacerbated by extreme use of their platforms. Meanwhile, YouTube is arguing that it simply isn't a social media platform at all, despite its pushes in recent years into short-form video that looks an awful lot like Instagram and TikTok, as well as photo-based posts.

A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the draw was Victor Wembanyama. We wanted a first-person glimpse of the 7-foot-5 alien. This plan settled on the edges of my mind until the conclusion of the NBA's All-Star break, after which it took on a new intensity. Beginning in mid-February, my brain regularly cycled through Wemby-centric thoughts as I went about my day-to-day: I hope I get to see Victor Wembanyama. I wonder how many sick dunks Victor Wembanyama will throw down. What's Victor Wembanyama doing right now? There was a brief moment of panic when I realized San Antonio was playing back-to-back nights on this Eastern road trip, with the stop in Brooklyn as the second leg. Would the Spurs rest him against the hapless Nets? Thankfully, they did not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZt95TcRIrU

In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it will abandon its efforts in the face of Paramount's hostile takeover bid, leaving Paramount and the Ellison family in possession of a massive swath of American cultural production and free to make it as poisonous as they please. WBD started walking down this road when it announced plans to unbuckle the two halves of its business from each other last summer. In this, the venerable entertainment company was simply following Comcast's lead, and not really intending to sell either its movie studio and streaming businesses or its cash-generating yet debt-saddled TV "global networks business"—but once the Ellison family bought Paramount, the WBD board clearly saw an opportunity to get a little bidding war going, and put a big For Sale sign out on the front lawn. WBD's board initially went with Netflix's proposal despite the streaming giant offering less cash than Paramount, because Netflix had agreed to buy only the streaming stuff, whereas Paramount wanted everything. Netflix agreed to pay $72 billion, or $27.75 per share, yet WBD's internal math reportedly valued the bid at closer to $31–32 per share, since WBD shareholders would get to hold onto some equity. Paramount wanted to pay cash for everything, and offered $30 per share at the launch of its hostile takeover. In its appeal to WBD shareholders, Paramount said the Netflix deal "offers inferior and uncertain value and exposes WBD shareholders to a protracted multi-jurisdictional regulatory clearance process." This was less a friendly warning than a threat. What it meant was: The Ellison family's close personal friend Donald Trump is not going to let this deal through.

I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one of the world’s elite readers, as you should. There’s just one problem. I’m also reading Paper, by Mark Kurlansky. And Island of the Blue Foxes, by Stephen Brown. And Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedgewick. And a dozen other books too, all at the same time. I also paused in the middle of reading all of those books to read, in its entirety, a history of The Cars, even though I was never that into The Cars. Reading that book led me to reading an entire oral history of MTV’s first decade on the air, which led me to reading an entire oral history of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the 1980s. Oh and after that, I finally started Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, which I’m definitely gonna finish before I return to all of those other books I’m reading, like the first one I mentioned—The Power Broker. I think that was the name of it. I’ll get back around to Robert Caro’s Pulitzer winner eventually. For now though, it sits in my Kindle library, sharing low completion percentages with multiple other tomes, some of which I haven’t picked back up in years. I also have a pile of somewhat-read dead-tree books stacked next to my nightstand. That pile used to rest on my nightstand before it grew too tall and wobbly. Now it serves as its own little extra nightstand in our bedroom. Sometimes I throw a T-shirt onto it.

The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors and attitudes a secret, even going to court to defend their right to keep their respective and collective sweatshop prerogatives private. Or at the very least, they sued to prevent the NFL Players Association from releasing the results of its annual players survey, which gave letter grades to the league's 32 rendering plants. Yeah, that secret kept well. A story by our much beloved and stealthy Comrade Emeritus Kahler, currently slumming it at ESPN, released part of the survey anyway, because every secret is just a whisper to be amplified later. What results she provided indicated that the Miami Dolphins are the best team to work for, provided you're not picky about your mood on Sunday evening. The Fish were rated for the third year running as the team that provides the best working environment, and yet their results remain deeply in the meh-to-feh range. With most projections for the 2026 season putting them in the rank-to-stank range, they'd better keep the thread count up in those table linens.