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Four different states put forward ballot measures on Tuesday that, if passed, would either strengthen or create new laws keeping trans children out of school sports. Though the night saw massive Democratic victories, even in typical Republican strongholds like Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina, the four initiatives on the ballot tell a different story. In two states, Arizona and Nebraska, the language will strengthen bans that were already on the books. In the other two states, Washington and Colorado, voters were asked to create new bans where none existed. As of Thursday, ballot measures in Arizona, Nebraska, and Washington were all projected to pass. Colorado's was too close to call, but the numbers leaned toward passage. Per TransAthlete.com, the passage of all four would bring the number of bans in the country, through either law or policy, up to 31. Here is how the four proposals break down:

Anyone familiar with the Free Press, and its institutional project of dehumanizing Arabs, would have known that Abdul El-Sayed's U.S. Senate election win was going to have a bad effect on some of its employees. Indeed, staff writer Olivia Reingold and reporter Maya Sulkin are currently competing to see who can crash out the hardest. Whereas Sulkin has taken the obvious route of recording herself quivering in fear at the sound of El-Sayed's name and his use of a few Arabic words, Reingold opted for something more perplexing: using artificial intelligence to produce an uncanny image of a woman's feet. "So far at Abdul El-Sayed’s election night event I’ve spotted, Valentino heels, a Chanel bag, a Moncler jacket, Rolex watches, and a YSL bag among other designer items," Reingold wrote on Tuesday night. She attached this photo to her message:

In 1974, scientists sent into space a radio message encoding some basic facts about Earth and humanity. In the "Arecibo message," we shared with the cosmos some information about the shape and size of human beings, and the composition of human DNA. This year, we should run it back, but with the following video message instead. Any life form out there should know that they are welcome here after receiving this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGQUu-4g8pk Victor Wembanyama logged 52 points, 24 rebounds, and eight blocks in the San Antonio Spurs' thrilling 112-111 win over the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday. It was a totalizing, two-way performance. Almost every possession offered a jump scare, as Wembanyama moved through space in ways heretofore unseen, or fused size and skill in ways not thought possible. Shots that would never been at risk of being blocked, at any previous point in NBA history, were in fact blocked. The 7-foot-4 guy blocking them was also beating his defender from the perimeter with a hesitation dribble. No one else mattered.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I’m on my hands and knees, working in the backyard. I rarely engage in any sort of gardening work, and by “rarely,” I mean never. I still have bitter memories of being forced to do yard work at my parents’ house as a kid, grabbing at the little weeds sprouting out of the cracks in the front walk, feeling the sweat gush out of me as I yanked and pulled and twisted. Every weed I uprooted just made me think about the countless more I still had to deal with. I knew many people who adored tending to their land, my mother included, but I was not among them. All I ever wanted to do was go back inside and watch MTV. The only satisfaction I got from doing the job was when parents paid me after the fact. Even then, they’d still point out all of the weeds I’d missed. Gardening was a hobby for the sadistic, I believed. Three back surgeries later, I had an all-too-convenient out to save myself from every getting my hands dirty again. My wife and I now have a nice-sized yard that requires care, and for the past 20 years, that work has been handled either by landscaping pros, my green-thumbed mother-in-law—who would often come by our house unannounced just to garden—or my wife. I myself never bothered going out there. After all, I had a bad back: a legitimate alibi that men like me love nothing more than to abuse. I used to mow our law myself right after we moved in 20 years ago, but with only a push mower at our disposal, I quickly deemed that job far too taxing.

Tuesday sure delivered. The blue wave—a bluenami—is a great relief to people with brains and functioning moral senses, but much of the strongest juice produced Tuesday night was drawn from a few individual races. Some of those were incredibly stirring. It feels amazing to wake up in a world where Susan Collins is out in Maine, Greg Abbott is out in Texas, data centers took a beating everywhere, Virginia finally and resoundingly overturned a Jim Crow-era voting restriction, and Vivek Ramaswamy ate a fat one. A strong contender for the funniest result, though, came in the race for the U.S. House seat from Arizona's first congressional district. Voters there did what ESPN so far has failed to do, and waved away a braying MAGA jackass of a former NFL special teams player. Jay Feely kicked for six NFL teams over a 14-season career, with notable stops in Atlanta, Arizona, and East Rutherford, where he had stints with both the Giants and Jets. His playing career petered out in 2014. By then, he'd already made himself known as a right-wing blowhard. Feely is buds with Fox News host Sean Hannity, and it was on Hannity's show, back in 2009, when he was kicking for the New York Jets, that Feely foreshadowed the rise of MAGA nationalism. What he said was stupid, of course, but in listening to Feely summarize a bunch of hazy, barely coded, haphazardly gussied-up criticisms as legitimate concerns over Barack Obama's unwillingness to "defend America's greatness," you could hear an irritating future Republican elected official finding his form. Feely's notional appeal, as an ascending conservative striver, is that he once had a manly job, can formulate a complete sentence, and projects masculine authority, often ostentatiously. That, plus a square jaw and a razor-sharp hair part, made him a natural for football broadcasts, and eventually a contender for some cushy political office in an ironclad conservative sanctuary. If he were half an inch taller or played a skill position, today he might be Secretary of Blowing Up Brown People.

Turns out there will be no LIV 2.0. The stupid noisy golf promotion, hanging on for dear life since its ultra-wealthy private backers abandoned it partway through its fifth season, has now shifted course. More to the point, it has shifted away from restructuring with an eye on a triumphant long-shot rebirth from bankruptcy, and instead to liquidation and dissolution, according to multiple reports. Barring cosmic intervention—an unholy anti-miracle—LIV Golf will be gone forever before the weather turns warm again. The grand plans of CEO Scott O'Neil—to relaunch the league in 2027, but with a stripped-down schedule, and living on a meager fraction of the outrageous funding it enjoyed before the Saudi Public Investment Fund booted it into the wilderness—died on Wednesday, when a handshake deal with a potential new investor fell apart, several days past the expiration of the second of two unmet deadlines. At issue, in the end, was O'Neil's inability to secure formal commitments from enough real-deal professional-grade players in time for his proposed new investor to "put together a bona fide league," according to reporting from the Financial Times. Most of the most prominent players from LIV Golf had already formally renounced the league and returned to the European tour. It was the European Tour that may have dealt LIV 2.0 its ultimate death blow, with an October announcement that it would henceforth deny membership to any player participating in what was, despite overtures to the contrary, a disruption-minded competitor. O'Neil needed to carve out other opportunities for his league's players: As has been pointed out by several departing pros, the 10 scattered events proposed for LIV 2.0's launch are simply not enough for anyone who is hoping to make noise at any of golf's annual majors, which together represent the pinnacles of a career in men's golf. The European Tour slamming the door was devastating, but earned. Rory McIlroy, cheering on the isolation and demise of a promotion he loathed from the beginning, told reporters this week that people from LIV Golf "were going around Augusta this year saying they wanted to destroy the European Tour," and expressed disgust at O'Neil's recent attempts to join hands and sing "Kumbaya, My Lord" with an organization that LIV Golf had been targeting for annihilation all along.

The Los Angeles Kings played as smooth a game as you'll ever see when they hosted the Sharks on Wednesday night, building a 3-0 lead in the first period and never looking back as they coasted to a 7-2 win. The Kings suffered through a troubled start to their campaign, losing six straight at the very beginning. They've since done some course correction, but teams good and bad are fattening up on San Jose these days. Just one minute into the evening, as the Sharks struggled to control possession in their attacking zone, L.A. playmaker Artemi Panarin got the puck on his stick by the boards and quickly fired a long-distance pass to Adrian Kempe, who'd disappeared behind the defense. The Kings' reigning top scorer finished his goal on the breakaway, starting his journey to an eventual hat trick. https://youtu.be/H1jv09GoC8w?si=G_7GuslqM1THkiZ7&t=13

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In many ways, Tinashe's career thus far has been a road map for navigating the changing landscapes of music and the music business. As the product of the post-2000 melding of pop artists and hip-hop production—think Britney with The Neptunes, or Nelly Furtado with Timbaland—Tinashe first broke out in 2014, when she made a very classical style of club-first major-label R&B. She had good singles, but the style of mainstream music she was making was falling out of fashion, replaced by a more alternative and insular style of pop R&B music, in the vein of Frank Ocean, SZA, Solange, and Brent Faiyaz. How we get from "2 On" to Tinashe's latest album feels legible but also completely unexpected. On Popstar, she defines what pop music for an internet age should be: club music that is postmodern and self-aware about living in an era of phones and people sitting on computers all day, while imploring them to get back outside. https://youtu.be/6JnGBs88sL0?si=Ia9Y4oR8oFI_k8vN

Elon Musk reportedly spent nearly half a billion dollars on the 2026 election, all of it going toward the effort to keep Donald Trump and the Republican Party in control of the entire U.S. government. He failed, of course; by now you've seen that the midterms turned out to be one of the most dramatic wave elections in living memory, flipping both houses of Congress and innumerable state offices to the Democrats. And so, on the one hand: Ha ha ha! You fuckin' loser! Eat shit! On the other hand, this made no appreciable dent in Musk's personal wealth. His net worth at most recent estimate sits somewhere in the neighborhood of $860 billion. The 55-year-old Nazi-saluting CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who occupies his free time posting calls for race war, could dump half a billion dollars on each of the next 16 elections in a row before he had spent one percent of his wealth. The world's richest individual spent, relative to the amount he can afford to spend, virtually no money at all. He can try this again, and he will, at larger scale and with better planning and more numerous redundancies. Unless.

A 4K re-release of Sylvester Stallone’s uplifting 1976 boxing classic, Rocky, will roll out across American cinemas this November to mark the film’s 50th anniversary. As will Peter Farrelly’s likewise uplifting making-of biopic, I Play Rocky, starring Anthony Ippolito (fresh off playing Al Pacino in the Godfather making-of biopic The Offer) as a young, hungry Stallone, warring with naysaying studio heads who don’t want him to play Rocky. Stallone himself is releasing The Steps, a memoir of his youth, his rise to Hollywood stardom, his lifelong love affair with abstract impressionist painting, the triumphant making of Rocky, and his more frustrated efforts to get a biopic of (of all people) Edgar Allan Poe greenlit.  Philadelphia, the Italian Stallion’s ancestral home, will host the “Rocky Steps Challenge,” which sees competitors racing up the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps. (All entrants will receive a commemorative Rocky headband.) The Philadelphia 76ers hosted a “Rocky Night” on Nov. 2. Gulp down a tall glass of eggs and take your best gal to the zoo, folks. America has Rocky Fever. Yet all the hubbub around Rocky risks distracting from another, only slightly less significant anniversary. Although 2026 may be the big 5-0 for the Oscar-winning Rocky, which is arguably one of the greatest sports movies of all time, it also marks the 41st anniversary of 1985’s Rocky IV, which is itself arguably, well … one of the sports movies of all time.