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You think about difficult things when you're stranded: dark thoughts of vanishing horizons, daunting ifs and thens, promises made to yourself on sleepless nights. And so it was for me last week, when a blizzard delayed our return home from a vacation long enough for me to miss recording the podcast. "If I ever make it home to my podcasting setup again," I swore to myself from the extremely comfortable hotel room that my wife and I wound up staying in for two delightful nights longer than expected, "I pledge that we'll have Spencer Hall on the podcast." These are the sorts of promises you make when you don't know if you're good for it, at moments when you don't know what a promise is worth. But look:

A tenant in a Brooklyn building owned by Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo has not had heat in his apartment since Feb. 23, when a blizzard dropped over 19 inches of snow on New York City. Between the months of October through May, when the outside temperature drops below 55 degrees, building owners in the city are required by law to heat apartments to at least 68 degrees during the day, and 62 degrees at night. In this case, those standards are not being met. This tenant, a longtime Bucks fan, has sent Instagram direct messages to the two-time MVP, hoping to get his attention. (We are protecting the tenant's identity because he has been subjected to threats as a result of his profession, and this interview effectively reveals his address.) Here's what it's like to have a top-three NBA player as your landlord while having no heat. The following interview, conducted on March 4, has been condensed and edited for clarity. When reached by Defector Thursday morning, a Bucks spokesperson declined to comment. Defector also called and emailed the property management company and Alex Saratsis, Antetokounmpo's agent, but has not received a response; we will update if that changes.

We may be witnessing the final days of Antoine Griezmann at Atlético Madrid. French by birth, Spanish by formation, and Uruguayan by choice, the culturally omnivorous superstar is apparently on the cusp of a long-gestating move to America, where he will be able to indulge another one of his international obsessions by immersing himself even more deeply in the NFL, while spending his down time playing in MLS. Thankfully, there are still important matches to play before his coming semi-retirement, and if the recent, spectacular performances of Griezmann's enduring talents have stood for anything, it's that his cleats probably aren't quite ready to follow where his pockets want to lead them. That Griezmann could be convinced to call an end to the European leg of his career is no great surprise. The man is set to turn 35 in a couple weeks, and with his advancing age has come a diminished role with his team. Only six of his 26 La Liga appearances this season have been starts. After providing the Colchoneros their spring for the greater part of the past decade (excepting a brief, ill-fated interregnum), Griezmann is no longer the one relied on to get the crowd jumping in Madrid. It's this lost prominence that, as recently as a week ago, reportedly had the Frenchman with one foot out of the door ahead of a move that would see him leave Atleti with immediate effect to join MLS's Orlando City. But if the past month has been something like a last dance, Griezmann's moves have been so good that they have basically obliged him to stick around and boogie the rest of the season away. This is primarily because of his exploits in the Copa del Rey. Things started in Atlético's quarterfinal match against Real Betis last month, which doubled as the debut of Ademola Lookman, the January signing who has breathed new life into what had been a ho-hum Rojiblanco season. Away in Seville, Atlético romped to a 5-0 win, the team's best performance since its surprise 5-2 beatdown of Real Madrid back in September. Lookman rightfully got the headlines thanks to his goal and assist in his first game in Spain, but as has so often been the case on the striped side of Madrid, it was Griezmann who pulled all the strings.

Three days before the first race of the Formula 1 season, it is impossible to overstate just how badly the Aston Martin team, newly headed by racecar guru Adrian Newey, have managed to botch it. Any attempt to summarize from an outsider's perspective will mostly boil down to an incoherent, expletive-laden babble—"Oh my god, they fucked it, it is unbelievable just how much they fucked it," etc.—but it's more effective to hear the facts directly from the sources themselves. Here are a few sentences Newey uttered in a 15-minute press conference (reportedly and fittingly plagued by microphone issues) prior to the Australian Grand Prix: "The vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems: mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all that sort of thing, which we are having to address." "Fernando [Alonso] is of the feeling that he can't do more than 25 laps consecutively before he risks permanent nerve damage to his hands." "We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration."

Before I went to Melbourne in January to cover the Australian Open for Defector and a couple other publications, I spent some time in New Zealand with my family. We lived there for five years when I was a child, and ever since we moved back to the United States, where I was born, it’s remained an idyllic place to return to. New Zealand also functions as a nice haven these days from winter in the United States both seasonally (it lasts about four months where I live) and politically (14 months and counting). Headlines about tariffs or Trump falling asleep in meetings land a little more softly from an ocean away. The distance can't cushion every blow, though. The news that the United States had ordered a military strike on Venezuela, killing more than 80 innocent people in the process, wouldn’t leave my head. When I read that the ICE agent Jonathan Ross had murdered Renee Nicole Good a few days later, I sat on my bed staring aimlessly at the wall for an hour, stewing in dread. I felt deeply embarrassed to go out to a cafe and order food with my American accent, like I needed to wear a sign reading I am from the United States, but I deeply hate what is going on there to assure baristas or cashiers that they weren't serving a cheerleader of this fucked-up regime.  Few journalists were asking American players about the state of their country at the Australian Open, which felt strange given the avalanche of awful news from it, before and during the tournament. The modern tennis professional, on average, weighs in on politics about as often and as deeply as a fourth grader. Still, when something is happening in the world, players tend to face questions about it. The WTA Finals have taken place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia the last two years and will again at the end of this season; the country's Public Investment Fund also gets a name-drop in both the ATP and WTA rankings. Though resistance to jumping in bed with a petrostate liberal in its censorship, sexism, and executions has largely faded, participants in the WTA Finals did talk about weighing the financial gain of the move against the moral pitfalls in 2024. Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian players have answered questions aplenty about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainian players' decision not to shake hands with Russian and Belarusian players, the latter group's ban from Wimbledon in 2022, and the blank flag that's been put next to their names on scoreboards ever since.  After some encouragement from another journalist, I pitched a piece on how American players were feeling about their country to an editor for The Athletic, whom I'd been doing some work for during the tournament. I began asking players questions, and phrased them nervously and vaguely—it felt like a spined creature was clawing its way into my throat from my stomach as I asked them. My regret from the reporting is that I wasn't more direct. Still, I got a variety of responses from eight players that ranged from thoughtful, to specific, to uninterested, to nothing at all. I felt they were interesting for what they were, but also for what they weren't—I could see the outlines of an agent's helping hand in some answers, the fear of antagonizing a strain of fans in some others. 

Nobody in the NBA has done nondescript quite like the Charlotte Hornets, and nobody has done it for as long. By long in this context we mean "forever." They have been the quintessential (and quit-essential, if truth be told) member of the league's ultra-forgettable Southeast Division since the franchise's second origin in '04-05, reliably turning purple and teal into washed-out gray on a yearly basis. The first Charlotte NBA team became what we now know as the New Orleans Pelicans when they left town in 2002, with all the vacuum-packed irrelevance that implies; the current incarnation began as an expansion team and has been the worst team in the league by aggregate record since, Sacramento and Washington included. The new iteration of the Bobcats/Hornets have played fewer playoff games than anyone else, been eliminated in the first round each time, and managed to further besmirch the name of Michael Jordan in the process. It can fairly be said that convincing Jordan to trade in his ownership for a run at NASCAR has been the franchise's most noteworthy achievement. But noteworthy isn't what the Hornets do. Mostly it is their invisibility in an invisible division that sets them apart from, well, nothing, really. Wednesday night marked just the second time in the past nine years that they have even been above .500 this late in a season. They are on the verge of knowing the sweet life provided by the play-in tournament in large part because Milwaukee stinks and everyone below them is turbo-tanking; if they make it, Charlotte's season will include an 83rd game for the first time in a decade. That fact, taken on its own, speaks only to the number of teams in the league currently forced to be horrible by management fiat. What makes these Hornets worth your time, at least for the few minutes you spend plowing through this thicket of arglebargle, is that they have lately been both quite good and quite fun to watch. In a league dominated by dissatisfaction from top to bottom, in which only Nico Harrison's besmirched reputation is even trying to make a comeback, the Hornets are kicking ass and leaving the name-taking to others. And that's saying something for a team that is 32-31 as dawn broke and tied with the (say it with us now) nondescript Atlanta Hawks.

In collective bargaining, "things tend to get done at the 11th hour," Adam Silver said in February, answering questions about the status of the WNBA’s ongoing CBA negotiations. "We are awfully close to the 11th now." The NBA commissioner wasn’t then ready to set a "drop-dead date," but the WNBA has since told players and teams that an agreement should be in place by March 10 for the season to begin as scheduled on May 8. An unusually heavy slate of league business still needs to get done this offseason: Nearly every veteran player is a free agent, and the two expansion franchises in Toronto and Portland also have to draft teams. The 11th hour has indeed been busy: After a monthlong stretch of no communication between the sides, the WNBA and WNBPA began exchanging proposals and counterproposals again in early February. While there are other issues being bargained over—housing, for instance, has come up in recent proposals—the key issue remains salaries, which are expected to rise considerably now that the league has signed a new media rights deal valued at over $2 billion.  Since opting out of the 2020 CBA in October of 2024, WNBA players have said they would like player salaries to be tied to the health of the business, calculated as a percentage of league revenue, similar to the NBA. Until now, the WNBA's salary cap has been a fixed and essentially arbitrary number; in 2022, base salaries amounted to less than 10 percent of league revenues. The union’s latest proposal reportedly asks that player salaries be on average 26 percent of gross revenue. (This would raise the 2026 salary cap to $9.5 million; in the old CBA, the 2026 cap was set to increase from $1.5 million to $1.55 million.) The league has offered players 70 percent of "net revenue" after expenses, a number that the union says would be less than 15 percent of gross revenue over the life of the deal.

In 1991, Spin magazine took the Compton rap collective N.W.A out to eat for a profile at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. The white author presents gangsta rap as a cynical enterprise, no different than escapist, violent popcorn blockbusters. “They’re not stupid, even though you may think so by the time you finish this article,” he writes of one of the greatest groups in the history of recorded American music. The first printed interview question is “Would you consider yourself a professional n****?” (The word was printed without asterisks.) The headline on the article is “N****Z4DINNER." The author, documentarian, and former photo editor at The Source, dream hampton, remembers that article serving as a rallying cry for the early iteration of The Source’s Mind Squad, including but not limited to the late, great James Bernard, Reginald Dennis, Matteo “Matty C” Capoluongo, Ed Young, Rob Tewlow, Dan Charnas, Kierna Mayo, Chris Wilder, and founders Dave Mays and Jonathan Shecter. “[Spin] were rock journalists thinking they are the punk to Rolling Stone’s mainstream. This type of shit was considered edgy at the time," hampton said. "The Source saw itself as being directly in conversation with that kind of drive-by journalism, with that kind of racist journalism. Because they loved this genre of music, hip hop, they were radicalized a bit around race. They rightly took offense to that kind of shit, and they saw themselves as an antidote to that. They were going to be people who actually understood and loved the music while everyone else was just kind of dabbling.” The Mind Squad and editorial staff like theirs—people who understood and loved the music—would create a new, vibrant, and deeply informed style of cultural journalism that defined an era. A number of outlets rose up as a corrective to what was then the mainstream’s mistreatment of hip hop, including DIY projects like The Source and Haji Akhigbade and Sacha Jenkins' Beat-Down Newspaper, and institutionally backed outlets from savvy, opportunistic readers of culture like Larry Flynt’s Rap Pages and Quincy Jones’s Vibe. These magazines did far more than take youth culture seriously. They documented and curated stories about rap, R&B, street fashion, film, current events, race, and politics. They employed pedigreed editors, journalists, critics and photographers like George Pitts, Riggs Morales, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Ben Mapp, and Joan Morgan. Much of the staff that put together these publications have gone on to become big names at institutions like The New York Times, in media as on-air talent, in publishing, and at the executive level in the music and entertainment industry. Others never got their due. 

The scheduled fight that no boxing fans asked for but all of us would have watched, Mike Tyson/Floyd Mayweather, ain’t gonna happen. For now, at least. Veteran boxing insider Dan Rafael reported last night that this latest melding of sports and circus "definitely" will not take place on April 25 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as originally announced. No specific reason was given for taking the fight off the calendar. A half-century-and-change ago, back when it was called Zaire, the same country hosted perhaps the biggest fight in boxing history: the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali vs. Foreman.  Don’t confuse Tyson vs. Mayweather with that. This one's a surefire hideousity. Tyson, a heavyweight from first fight to last, is 59 years old; Mayweather, whose best days came as a welterweight, is a ring-worn 49. Both retired from real fighting long ago, and both went out the first time in sanctioned sideshows. Mayweather’s 50th and allegedly final official fight came in 2017 in Las Vegas, when he carried MMA blowhard Conor McGregor, a boxing novice making his professional debut, for nine rounds before knocking him out. Mike Tyson’s last even vaguely authentic fight came 21 years ago in D.C., when the onetime baddest man on the planet got humiliated and stopped after six rounds by a different pasty Irish dude, Kevin McBride. These going-away fiascos each drew stout live gates and pay-per-view revenues: Mayweather/McGregor brought in a reported $600 million, which made it the second-largest PPV of all time.

Jess McClain was cruising to her first U.S. half-marathon championship this past weekend in Atlanta when the lead vehicle in charge of driving the course ahead of her made a wrong turn with less than two miles to go, sending her and the other would-be top three runners off the course and costing them the benefits of finishing on the podium: prestige, money, and spots on the team the U.S. will send to the World Championships. McClain was well clear of Emma Grace Hurley and Ednah Kurgat when the incident took place, and all three had to turn around, make their way back onto the course, and finish down the standings, in ninth, 12th, and 13th, respectively. The runners filed formal appeals and protests, which were summarily denied. Per a statement from USA Track & Field: [T]he course was not adequately marked at the point of misdirection. This violation contributed to the misdirection taken by the athletes within the top four at the time of misdirection. However, the jury of appeals finds no recourse within the USATF rulebook to alter the results order of finish. The results order of finish as posted is considered final.