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Was the biggest sports story in Ireland this week fake, or just early? The National League hurling and football seasons kick off this weekend, ending several months of Gaelic sports famine. On Monday, the government-owned broadcast network and news service RTE ran a blockbuster piece about a pro-Palestinian protest by players on Dublin’s squads. According to the article, written by RTE’s Niall McCoy and labeled as “Exclusive,” members of the Dublin sides decided “to refuse to appear in front of Allianz-branded signage” this season because of the insurer’s business dealings in Israel since the Gaza invasion. The RTE story inspired other Irish athletes to chime in with support, generated related protests, and overwhelmed all other opening weekend news. Then, the story got refuted. Allianz, a German-based insurance giant, has been the leagues’ title sponsor since 1993. So avoiding the company’s logos on game broadcasts is no simple chore, and would at the very least mean the protesting players would be declining man-of-the-match interviews and award ceremonies. That would complicate matters for RTE, which has domestic broadcast rights for the All-Ireland and National League football and hurling competitions, which are not only the biggest annual athletic events but are part of the island nation’s identity and history in ways that few sports are tied to any other country.

The origin of Michael Connelly’s new true crime podcast, Killer in the Code, was a rather far-fetched tip fielded by Rick Jackson, a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. A self-described “cold case consultant” named Alex Baber told him that he’d cracked two legendary mysteries. The first was the killing of Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the Black Dahlia, whose bisected corpse was left in South Los Angeles in 1947. The second was the five homicides committed in the Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969 by an epistle-happy psychotic calling himself the Zodiac. All six homicides, Baber claimed, were committed by one man—and there was proof. The evidence was, in part, a name found in “Z13,” the cipher the Zodiac mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970. This was his third cryptographic missive; he’d sent two much longer efforts the previous year. “My name is —,” the killer wrote and, in lieu of his identity, provided a string of 13 characters. Unlike the earlier ciphers, which have been decoded (the first within days, the second in 2020), Z13 had not been definitively solved. Baber claimed to have cracked the code and to have unearthed the name of the killer: Marvin Merrill. This is not the first outlandish attempt to solve the killing of Short, or the subsequent Zodiac homicides. History is littered with such endeavors—fingering all sorts of unlucky souls as America’s great uncaught murderer, whether it’s Janice Knowlton pinning the death of Short on her own father or San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith using the 1986 bestseller Zodiac to connect the crimes to Arthur Leigh Allen. There was even a prior effort to link these two specific cases, when former LAPD detective Steve Hodel attributed the crimes on his own father.

Drama is where you make it, and in how willing you are to inflate a story past the outer limits of its molecular structure. Take the groundbreaking Curt Cignetti Chipotle story as an example: A series of blogs and memes and sports talk radio segments have been launched around a bland meal, ordered daily from a familiar food chain by someone who happened to win a championship. It is a perfectly reasonable if obviously silly thing, and so obviously not worth caring about that it almost comes around the other side and becomes interesting for how uninteresting it is. There's no reason not to expend some words on it, and also no real reason to do so. Monomaniacs who eat the same thing every day tend to worry their families and friends until something good happens to them, but when that good thing happens, you've got content. As opposed to, say, a worthwhile food review. And then there is Jonathan Kuminga's ongoing saga with and against the Golden State Warriors, which we have already hashed and rehashed until it looks like the Cignetti meal. After being consigned to first hell and then purgatory, Kuminga is now taking us on a trip through postmodernist comedy. To review: Kuminga, formerly the future of the franchise a la James Wiseman and Moses Moody, has repeatedly asked for and eventually demanded a trade because he believes the Warriors have deliberately stunted his career. The Warriors say Kuminga is hard to trade because the demand for him by other teams is too modest. He wound up deep into Steve Kerr's doghouse, to the point where the end of the Warriors bench was rezoned commercial so that it could legally include a kennel. Then Jimmy Butler sustained a season-ending injury, and Kuminga was grudgingly returned to the rotation. He scored 20 points in 21 minutes in a loss to Toronto, and then three days later scored 10 in nine minutes in a loss at Dallas. You can see a pattern of decently efficient scoring developing there, and possibly the beginning of a market for a player who didn't previously have one.

The cheek, to even attempt a deflection from there. It's hard enough to tip in a puck right from the goalie's doorstep. That sucker is small, hard, and moving well above the speed limit, and it's a genuine feat of hand-eye coordination to not just get a blade on it, but to get only just so much blade on it to not halt it but redirect it to the angle of your choosing. This is probably the hardest hockey thing that the best make look easy. Joe Pavelski dined out on it. Chris Kreider made a career of it. But right up there with them is Sidney Crosby, giving himself what could only be described as a heat check on Thursday night, attempting a redirect from 20 damn feet away. At least. https://youtu.be/UDXyGhZ99dE?si=L1-iKUE91cIwCVMP&t=107 Crosby's flawless redirect off a nice pass from Ryan Shea, his 27th goal of the season, capped off three Penguins goals in 37 seconds, and though that would prove enough, the Penguins poured it on against old mate Tristan Jarry, winning 6-2 in Edmonton, and moving clear of the Islanders for second in the Metro.

Have you heard the old wives’ tale that if two football teams face each other in four consecutive matches, their fates swap the next season, Freaky Friday style? That seems to be what has happened to Manchester City and Chelsea, whose domestic seasons a year ago were defined by a four-game series in March of 2025. Chelsea may have won three of those matches, but it’s City who is now looking like the stronger side a year later. Indeed, the teams are trending in opposite directions entirely.  City is finally finding the success that the individual talent on its roster has long suggested it could. Manager Andrée Jeglertz arrived in the summer and has figured out how to make a cohesive group out of the team’s array of super talents, which includes the likes of Bunny Shaw, Vivianne Miedema, Yui Hasegawa, Kerstin Casparij, and Kerolin. City sits atop the WSL table a little over halfway through the season, six points ahead of second-place Chelsea and 10 points clear of third-place Arsenal with 10 games left to go.

David Roth: I feel like when we have these sorts of conversation blogs on the site, the subject is generally something that everyone kind of likes, but not in a way that they’d fully feel comfortable putting their name on a blog about—your Reachers, or your Wildwood Boardwalks. So I want to begin by saying that I think that both of the recent sequels in the 28 Days Later series are really good, and even intermittently kind of profound-feeling, and that no one throws a regulation-size barbecue grill at anyone else. Tom Ley: Right off the bat, I need to say that I love 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple in a totally genuine, non-ironic way. I just really admire what Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are doing with these latest installments in the series, and I can’t think of any studio movie I’ve seen recently that strikes a better balance between off-the-wall weirdness, gnarly violence, and true profundity. I especially like how these two movies counterbalance each other, with 28 Years Later being this kind of mythical, big-hearted story, and The Bone Temple being this deeply upsetting horror flick that also manages to be really, really funny. David: This is the bit that I’ve tried and failed to convey to people in explaining how much I have enjoyed these last two movies—they really are, tonally and in terms of basic storytelling choices, completely berserk. Just some of the wildest decisions that I have seen made in a film of this scale since the decline of widespread cocaine-driven decision-making in the industry during the 1990s. None of this was necessarily anything that you’d be able to predict from having seen the (very good) original or 28 Weeks Later, the pretty effective but slightly more disreputable and much less interesting first sequel. What was a very stylish and scary franchise of zombie movies has become, somehow, both a much more commercially successful enterprise and something much weirder than it started out being.

Ötzi, the 5,000-something-year-old man found frozen in the Alps, did not have an easy go of it. He was probably murdered, shot from behind with an arrow that missed his vital organs and led to heavy bleeding and a prolonged and painful death. Days before his death, he fought another person in hand-to-hand combat and gashed his right hand. The more scientists have been able to study his body, the more ailments they have unveiled. Ötzi was born without a 12th pair of ribs, and the ones he was born with were broken. He had feasted on the fat of an alpine ibex the day of his murder—a rare win for the iceman—but his intestines teemed with Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which can cause ulcers. In fact, Ötzi had carried this bacteria long enough that he probably had gastritis or an ulcer or two. (And unfortunately one scientist who has tried alpine ibex described the taste of its fat as "horrible.") Ötzi also ate a toxic plant called bracken in an attempt, some scientists suggest, to rid himself of whipworm parasites, which had laid eggs in his colon. His lungs were sooty, blackened by days spent huffing smoke from fires. The list of his ailments goes on and on: He had fleas in his clothing. He was lactose intolerant. He had horizontal grooves on his fingernails that indicate great physical stress. He had gum disease and cavities. He was predisposed to male-pattern baldness, diabetes, and obesity. And to top it all off, he had Lyme disease, too. Sucks to be an iceman! It is darkly comic, in a way, to read about new research on Ötzi. Each new paper invariably reveals one more wretched malady. Perhaps next year we will learn that Ötzi had pimples or weird-looking knees or just a bad vibe generally. Archaeology can be a blessing and a curse for the people whose bodies persist for examination. You live on for centuries past your actual lifetime, offering valuable scientific insight into the history of our species. And also scientists get to spend thousands of dollars figuring out everything that was wrong with you and publishing it online forever. Anyway, science recently dealt a fresh new blow to Ötzi's fragile self-image in the form of a preprint published on bioRxiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. (Outside researchers interviewed by Science and LiveScience found the paper convincing.) Apparently the iceman had the human papillomavirus. And Ötzi didn't have just any HPV, he had HPV-16, a high-risk strain that is responsible for most HPV-related cancers.

It's not great, if I'm being honest. From amending my answer to the question "How ya doing, Roth" at the very beginning of this week's episode of The Distraction, it is clear that things are not going great. But for the second straight week, we found a way to split our episode between the Not Great stuff and being stupid about sports, with the result being one of the most enjoyable hours of my week. I'm not saying we've solved anything—honestly, if I thought we had solved something through our goofy podcast, I'd be kind of worried—but we've at least figured out a balance that works. Of course, it helps when the guest is Patrick Wyman, America's largest historian, author of the upcoming book Lost Worlds, and a great podcaster in his own right. I've sought out his perspective on both the present and the past for years, and we got a decent dose of both in this episode. We spoke about the corrosive effect of sustained exposure to bad vibes, and the run-in with an unnamed former MLB player at an Arizona youth soccer game that inspired Patrick to purchase a heavy bag, but we also talked about history stuff. This meant trying to understand our current moment of national crisis in the context of the country's fractious and generally insane history, and examining the sclerotic empire we're in and what does and doesn't work about it; I misattributed an insight from one friend to another here, but the conversation didn't really suffer for it. And then, after a discussion of the country's competing layers of authority—and how fragile and contingent their relationship and everything that followed from them always was—we turned to Pete Hegseth's impossibly shitty kettlebell swings.

On Tuesday, some number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents camped out near Liam Conejo Ramos's home in the Twin Cities suburb of Columbia Heights and waited for him to return with his father, so they could ambush them. According to news reports, agents grabbed Liam out of a car that was still running in the driveway, with one agent leading him to the door of his house in an effort to draw out any other family members at home. ICE then took Liam and his father into custody; their lawyers believe they are now likely being detained in Texas. Liam is 5 years old. He was on his way home from pre-kindergarten, where he was doing all the things that other 5-year-olds do, like learning how to trace letters and learn words. A group of grown men in tactical gear, working under the auspices of the federal government, bum-rushed a kid in a bunny hat with a Spider-Man backpack on his way home from doing those things and then tried to use him as bait in the president's ongoing siege against the country he leads. Once again, the Department of Homeland Security deployed lies to justify its actions: ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED. On January 20, ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias an illegal alien from Ecuador who was RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration. As agents approached the driver Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, fled on foot—abandoning his child. For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.

My favorite goal that I've ever seen live: Jan. 4, 2019, the woeful Detroit Red Wings hosting a really good Nashville Predators squad. The Wings went into it having lost 10 of their last 11, and they started the game by surrendering the first two goals. But from 0-2 down, they put together an unexpected comeback, first with a speedster highlight from Andreas Athanasiou, then scores from Thomas Vanek and Tyler Bertuzzi. The Preds tied the game up late in the third, forcing overtime, and just when it looked like we were headed for a shootout, the team's beloved leader—though not yet captain—settled things himself. Dylan Larkin deked out one Nashvillain at the top of the offensive zone, curved away from another, and then flipped a backhander past a couple more bodies and into the net. I think of this goal often to remind myself that, no matter how a season's gone in the weeks or months before, it's always worth going to a rink and screaming for the home team. Every game has the potential to make you very, very glad you went. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0HLag-pQt8 Now an 11-year vet, the 29-year-old Larkin has only become more enmeshed in the hearts of Red Wings fans, even as the franchise itself has stayed stuck in neutral. In 2015–16, he led the Wings in scoring as a rookie before they stalled out in a five-game first-round series against the Lightning. Since then, every other player on the roster has moved on, and the Red Wings haven't made a single playoff appearance.