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This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada's daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers' payroll are America's, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. But clearly, if anyone involved wanted to change our consumption diets, we would have at least stopped eating that second bowl of ice cream by now. And say this much for the latest edition of Leafs Institutional Misery: It has been busy. Toronto's season has been a cavalcade of hope-turned-to-manure almost since Canadian Thanksgiving, to the point where the wheels of their nine-year streak of underachieving in the playoffs had come off the wagon entirely, and in the worst imaginable way. From Jan. 12 through yesterday, they had gone 4-12-4, and hadn't won a single game against an American-based team. Since the National Hockey League is 78 percent American, this presents a real mathematical challenge to glory, with the result being that this Leafs season has been abandoned and the arguments about it have morphed into how many people at multiple organizational levels must be fired for cause, and what specific star they should be fired into. Their talent level has been mocked, their basic team structure besmirched, even their molecular GAF has been shamed. To satisfy an incandescent fan base and begin the desperately needed rebuild, something is going to need to be done, mostly to someone else. That does not separate the Leafs from any other forlorn team, of course, and as a result Thursday night's game against Anaheim held minimal interest and emitted minimal significance—until it very much did. The unimportant part is that the Leafs won, 6-4, to break an eight-game losing streak, which in its own way is another bad result for those who support the idea of a catastrophic bottom-out for the sake of draft lottery odds and getting a jump-start on the reconstruction work ahead. But under the theory that you can still have your house catch fire when it rains, this win was way worse than that. That's because the team's captain and best player, Auston Matthews, had his knee crushed on an open-ice knee-to-knee hit from Anaheim's notorious troublemaker Radko Gudas. This takes the worst-case scenario and turbocharges it.

Basketball is meant to be played on blacktop or hardwood. But some big-thinking Big 12 dumbass big-thought it was time to give glass a shot.   That dumbass is conference commissioner Brett Yormark, who installed a high-tech LED court made of glass for the league tournament, which is being contested this week in Kansas City. Turns out glass is fine for backboards, but, as has been clear since the tourney started, not the floor. So now they're uninstalling it: CBS Sports reported Thursday night that the commissioner, who came to the Big 12 after a run as COO of Jay Z’s Roc Nation, decided to yank his avant-garde surface and replace it with "a traditional hardwood court" forthwith. Yormark said he made the decision after talking to “the coaches of our four semifinal teams.”  Probably could have added “and a personal injury attorney.”

Miami-Dade prosecutors filed four criminal charges against Atlanta Falcons edge rusher James Pearce Jr. on Thursday, following his arrest last month. The charges came a few weeks after a Miami-Dade circuit judge extended a temporary restraining order granted to Pearce's ex-girlfriend, WNBA player Rickea Jackson, who told the court that Pearce had physically abused her and threatened to kill her, including a threat "to place a bag over my head." In her request, the Los Angeles Sparks forward told the court, "I am truly in fear for my life." The four criminal charges are: felony aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, felony fleeing police, felony resisting an officer with violence, and misdemeanor stalking. The charge of aggravated battery, according to the charging document, is for driving his car into Jackson's car, and the stalking charge is because prosecutors said he followed, harassed, or cyberstalked Jackson leading up to the day when she went to the Doral police station, seeking help. The other two charges are connected to the police chase that followed. Here is what Jackson said happened, as described in her subsequently granted restraining order request.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus, that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine. These attempts at innovation and relevance have made for interesting music, but they have also created a lot of stale stuff that has no real point of view beyond the tastes of a particular artist/ producer. Even worse, much of it has been channeled into what has been termed "Toxic R&B," a sub-genre that mostly involves men crooning delicately about their inability to be good partners. In a time when rap has become the center of pop music, it seems to be the easiest way by which men (usually men) who sing can still affect the machismo of rap, despite not actually rapping. https://youtu.be/6qdk82CUy74?si=Fmw0uyRkp8kl14Vg

Give me the biggest hockey man you have. No, even bigger than that. Make him huge. Make him tall, thick, and dense—a real slab. Give him a powerful slapshot, and a willingness to use it. Make it the fastest, hardest, heaviest shot in the sport. Make him eager to use it. Let him go weapons-free and really wallop the bejesus out of that puck as hard and as often as he can. Let's see how much that puck can take. Let it be punished for its crimes. He is large, like a beef, and it is small and hard, and all the laws of physics conspire to impart his magnified aggression upon it. Woe be unto those in its path! Let him clobber the puck again. And again and again. Torque and leverage and ill will are his compatriots, while its allies have deserted it. No goalie comes to its rescue to cover it. No whistle provides a temporary truce so that it may live to be abused another day. See: Again, he is rearing back. Again, he is preparing the lash. Beatings will continue until morale improves or possession is turned over. Neither come. The puck is funneled back to him. What did it do in its past life to deserve this? Why are they letting children watch this carnage? He is a disc of rubber and pain, now. In the world, there is only him and the huge man's stick. The huge man winds up again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQPA1MXI-Nc

After a courtship that took longer to consummate than a Victorian marriage, Kyler Murray has signed a deal with the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikes are on the hook for a single season at the league minimum, with the quarterback’s former employer, the Arizona Cardinals, picking up the rest of the tab. It’s just like the deal that Russell Wilson signed with Pittsburgh after getting curbed by Denver, with the notable exception that Wilson was five years older and many years cornier. Out of all the potential quarterbacks that the Vikings could have plucked off the scrap heap, Murray was the best of a decidedly motley crew. Of course, Minnesota didn't have to be in this position to begin with. Two years ago, the Vikings signed Sam Darnold to a one-year flyer so that he could serve as a bridge QB while the team spent a year developing then-rookie JJ McCarthy behind the scenes. Darnold was a revelation in 2024, tossing 35 TDs and leading the Vikings to 14 wins. Then he fell apart in the final two games of that season, including a woeful performance in a wild-card loss to the Rams, and the Vikings (and their fans) decided that one year of Darnold was all the Darnold they required. They decided wrong. Infamously so. Darnold went to Seattle and immediately won his new team a Super Bowl. McCarthy—and maybe you heard about this—did not. In just one season, Minnesota went from having the best deep passing attack in football to having no passing attack at all. To make matters worse, the Vikings had also failed to retain QB Daniel Jones for the 2025 season, leaving Max Brosmer and a half-deceased Carson Wentz as the only other options in their QB room. I’ve had more fun watching a fish die out of water.

I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new startup that would soon fizzle into obscurity. Mostly I was confused by their gargantuan ad budget. I was not alone. But the ads never relented, and as I was served unskippable Grammarly ads again and again, the script seared into my brain: "Writing's not that easy, but Grammarly can help." The ads irritated me so much that, on principle, I tried to coat my brain in teflon and slough off any and all information about Grammarly's whole deal, which meant that I barely registered what, exactly, the company did. But even back then, before I had any real reason to, I knew then that I hated Grammarly. Grammarly, which was founded in 2009 and rebranded as Superhuman last fall, used tools like machine learning to proofread people's writing. It checked grammar and spelling, similar to Microsoft's Office Assistant, albeit with none of Clippy's signature panache. If Grammarly's ads were to be trusted, it was perfect for people like Tyler, who needed Grammarly's help to write an email to his boss Anita. In that commercial's logic, Tyler wants Anita to like him, but he doesn't want to sound unsure of himself. So Grammarly helps him swap words like "really helpful" to "beneficial" and "educational" to "informative," words, we are told, that will connect better with Anita. Tyler's successful email means Anita emails him back in just a few minutes, and they can now ride the elevator together standing close to each other. Each time I was forced to watch this ad, I remember wondering: Are Tyler and Anita going to smash? That product appeared somewhat benign, considering the wretched contemporary landscape of overtly malevolent tech companies with even more discomfiting ads. But not to be outdone, in 2023 Grammarly introduced generative AI assistance, which, among other things, offered to now do the writing for you. In the years following, the company expanded its suite of generative AI fripperies, with features such as "AI Instagram Caption Generators" or a feature called "Improve It" that offered to "make" a piece of writing any of the following adjectives: diplomatic, exciting, inspirational, friendly, empathetic, assertive, confident, or persuasive. This all sounded like stupid, run-of-the mill gen-AI bluster.

There's a type of unearned pride that comes with watching your buddies do well, but it carries some anxiety with it. Of course we were happy that Rohan Nadkarni, our frequent guest and lunch correspondent, was doing such good work for NBC's Sports Desk newsletter from the Milan Cortina Olympics; of course things like him interviewing Alysa Liu gave us that feeling of accomplishment by association. But there was also a whisper of concern that wouldn't go away, the small voice in my head asking, "But is he eating okay over there?" Well, I have some good news: Rest assured that we do "get to that," but Rohan's return to the podcast after five excruciating weeks away also coincided with a very Rohan-specific turn in current sports news. And so, before we got to the carbohydrate content, we talked about Bam Adebayo's sublimely preposterous 83-point game and the noise surrounding it, how getting stunted on this hard might or might not help fix tanking, and the ways in which the NBA could but probably will not actually improve its product. The Kobe Discourse is considered; I briefly digress about Michael Porter Jr. speaking on these females. It's still a Rohan episode, but we were able to stay on topic for a while.

On Monday, while the nation's attention was focused squarely on the war with Iran, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division announced that it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against one of the most loathed companies in the country: Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The case was a long time in the making, as it was filed in May 2024 after the great Taylor Swift Ticketmaster ticket bungle of 2022, but in the end it wrapped up quickly, with neither ceremony nor consequence. Live Nation agreed to take a number of slaps on the wrist, but was able to keep control of Ticketmaster, and with it a monopoly on the live-events experience in this country. Live Nation and Ticketmaster first announced plans to merge in 2009, a move that would give the resulting company the ability to take total control of the U.S. ticket-selling market and squeeze everyone involved. At the time, Bruce Springsteen was vocally opposed to the deal, warning that it would essentially give the new entity a monopoly on event ticketing in the U.S., but despite the Boss's protests, the DOJ approved the merger in 2010. The intervening 15 years have seen the new company make the experience of going to any show painful and the experience of putting on any show both annoying and less lucrative than it used to be, with Live Nation operating most venues and Ticketmaster controlling access to virtually all of them. While the consent decree that was part of the 2010 deal theoretically kept Live Nation from punishing venues that did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in practice this is a monopoly. In 2019, the DOJ strengthened and extended the consent decree after finding out about what Live Nation was doing. Not that it made anything better for either consumers or event-throwers. It took the aforementioned Swift fiasco—in which millions of fans tried and failed to purchase tickets to Swift's Eras Tour thanks to Ticketmaster's website crashing, leaving them unable to go to the show or being forced to pay through the nose to scalpers, in theory the very outcome that Ticketmaster's stupid website's bustedness is set up to prevent—to get regulators to actually try and make a real case. The outrage over Ticketmaster's mishandling of the Eras Tour led to fiery Senate hearings, and finally an antitrust case. "It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster," then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged. Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada. The younger-kids division included a 4th-grader who was training with the reigning North American title-holder, Mack Meller, who himself competed in the event more than a decade earlier.