NowLoop

New York Knicks center Mitchell Robinson is an emotional poster. The big man often posts about his romantic woes, dissatisfaction with his role on the team, and truck. He posts across multiple social media platforms, even Facebook, despite being 28 years old. He posts with sincerity and without self-consciousness. If you lacked the context that he is a standout defensive big in the NBA, you'd simply assume he was a guy you friended in 2011 and never met since. Contrary to expectations, Robinson hasn't played a ton of minutes in the Knicks' first-round series against the undersized Atlanta Hawks, but he remains engaged nonetheless. On Wednesday, apparently looking ahead to tonight's Game 6, Robinson posted a video of himself burning something on his driveway, and silently staring into the flames. It's captivating stuff. https://twitter.com/NBA_NewYork/status/2049721684702154913

The figure skater who said that Canadian ice dancer Nikolaj Sørensen sexually assaulted her—leading to Sørensen's ban from the sport, and his former partner (and current girlfriend) teaming up with a new skater, with whom she won Olympic gold—is speaking publicly for the first time. She is Ashley Foy, a former figure skater from Connecticut who now coaches. USA Today's Christine Brennan shared on Thursday a statement from Foy. Foy also gave an extensive interview to the newsletter Broken Ice. https://bsky.app/profile/cbrennansports.bsky.social/post/3mkq3mqfb222k The statement references several of the darker parts of recent figure skating history. Bridget Namiotka was among several skaters who said she was sexually assaulted by U.S. national pairs champion John Coughlin. Coughlin died by suicide not long after the investigation and restrictions placed upon him became public. Namiotka died in 2022, after struggling with addiction. Olympic medalist Ashley Wagner also said she was sexually assaulted by Coughlin.

Sometimes it's good to get back to basics. We have been enjoying a nice run of guests recently, and have produced some decently delightful episodes as a result. But at its heart, this podcast is about two middle-aged men honking at each other about sports and other things, and as such, it is in our best interests as its stewards to return periodically to first principles. From time to time, you gotta honk. There is a decently normal episode of The Distraction embedded within, one which features both a discussion of the NBA playoffs and a fairly nuanced assessment of our absolutely rancid political moment. For me, it is mostly about the honking. When we discussed what kind of TV is best to watch at the dentist, that is honking. Sharing our experiences of getting enormous flannel sleepy pants as a Christmas gift, and being glad to have them? Honking. Our free-associative response to the listener voicemail reopening the question of Hero Sandwich Discovered In Public Bathroom, which begins with us listening and learning and ends with me telling a story about seeing a man who is notably not Dave McKenna using a sandwich bag as a wallet? Buddy, you already know that's honking.

Converts can often seem like the only really religious people around. They tend to take their faith up, whatever it may be, with enthusiasm and vigor and, most importantly, without embarrassment; the cliché of the "zealotry of the convert" is well known even beyond the confines of institutional or traditional belief. No shrug of ambivalence for the initiate. But then, that's what makes them suspect, what raises the eyebrows of the already faithful and the question of who, really, belongs to the faith, and to whom it belongs, and above all who will determine where it goes.  Paul, the one-time persecutor of the troublesome Jesus-followers, and not any of the original disciples who actually knew Christ, is credited with transforming Christianity from a radical Jewish sect into the universal Church. This has long been a subject of contention, or at least conversation. What was lost, and what was added in, when the original encounter was supplanted by the message, the idea, and eventually the institution? For some purists today, that's where it all went wrong. For others, elsewhere: Everyone picks their own beginning. The self-possession of the convert, so much a double-edged sword within  their chosen confines, is also what makes them a source of fascination in the wider world of our secular modernity. For years now we've been told in reporting and opinion pages about the great swathes—or small, indicative pockets—of people taking up "traditional" faiths, largely Roman Catholicism, though with some seekers finding their home in the presumably even more traditional Eastern Orthodoxy. The most famous of these adult converts is the current American vice president, JD Vance, who, under the twin influences of Rod Dreher and Peter Thiel, entered into the Church in 2019. Against the arid monoculture of liberalism, or else against the florid multitudes of multiculturalism, these neophytes seek out the depths and the heights, adventure and homecoming, the paradoxical and the irresistibly rational. This morass, in any case, is how people tend to talk about converts and conversions and the questions around which these words turn.

This Mammoth–Golden Knights first-round series has looked about as even as they come, but it's been anything but a stalemate. With one experienced team filled with established superstars (Vegas) and one hungry newcomer still finding its full potential (Utah)—plus the fact that neither side can boast a hot or even room-temperature goalie—these games have been tugged in every conceivable direction. Big leads suddenly appear and then evaporate. Momentum-shifting goals find the net dang near every period. Tired East Coast bloggers think they're free to fall asleep until suddenly, Nope, we're doing overtime. In a follow-up to a Game 4 where Vegas took a 3-0 lead, went down 4-3, and came back to win in OT, these squads put together yet another 5-4 thriller—this one needing a second overtime to finally settle. The Golden Knights are now just one win from escaping the Mammoth. But in this series, no win comes predictably or painlessly. The high final scores in these games belie long stretches of strong defensive hockey from both sides—goalies excluded. But this is the playoffs, so all that really matters is who bends enough to break. In this Nevada-set Game 5, the first four goals followed a pattern: Utah would get theirs, and then a few minutes later Vegas would get one back. Late in the second, the Golden Knights took their first lead on a play you can't help but blame on Karel Vejmelka in net. Then it was Dylan Guenther—Utah's 23-year-old leading goal-scorer and one of many Mammoths playing in their first-ever (or first excluding the 2020 bubble) postseason—who evened things with a one-timer off a breakout about six minutes into the third. And with time ticking away in regulation, the Mammoth forced a turnover in their own end, then hit the gas. This time, playoff newcomer Michael Carcone finished the chance on the rush, earning the goal that—not that I'm complaining!—looked like it would give me a full night's sleep. https://youtu.be/hJKLePWbERc?si=r2GQLL1w8YmIwR_6&t=379

When LIV Golf launched in 2022, many were skeptical that there was a viable commercial lane for a new professional golf tour, even if it was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's seemingly bottomless Public Investment Fund and driven by the definitely bottomless cynicism of contemporary global power politics. With the news on Wednesday that the Saudi PIF would no longer be funding LIV Golf after this season, we can probably go ahead and hand it to the skeptics. As a soft-power gambit channeled through the universal language of sports, LIV was a flop, but it wasn't a total failure. As a way to get some cheesy bribes into various pockets, it worked out fine. The PGA Tour, which was stodgy and exploitative and had alienated some of its most prominent players, really was ripe for competition. But what LIV offered was instantly recognizable as something else: This was disruption, the already antique-feeling pejorative for what happens when an unconscionable amount of venture capital is blasted in the direction of something that already exists, to see if the pressure of all that money might somehow fracture it in a profitable way. The results of this particular gambit were inessential at best and stupendously wack at worst. LIV Golf's signature innovations on the form were that events were three days and 54 holes instead of four and 72, and that they would have the sort of corporate-event party vibe that ensured a Chainsmokers song would be audible during every one of those holes. It was always going to suck; the question, from the beginning, was whether that still mattered. From its inception, LIV was a rich-guy nuisance lawsuit in the shape of a pro sports league. The vibes were appallingly wretched, even by the low expectations you might have for a collaboration between Phil Mickelson and Saudi Arabia. But the people pushing LIV—the most aggrieved current and former pro golfers; Donald Trump and his greasy inner circle of Bribe Guys; various sheikhs—were making a bigger bet. They proceeded as if all that money and influence would make the low quality of the actual product irrelevant. As with so many other things in the culture that could be described as Trumpy—lavishly gilded, obviously corrupt, all done on the fly and in the open and with a bunch of visibly rotting celebrities sucking around—it felt both obviously doomed and somehow inexorable.

If you paid any attention to the NBA after the calendar flipped to 2026, you were inundated with feverish debates about how to solve the supposedly existential crisis facing the league: tanking. With a strong 2026 draft class awaiting them, the worst 10 teams in the league attempted to lose as many games as possible to maximize their draft lottery odds, resting their good players with fake injuries, pulling effective players from close games, and playing G League–level guys for 48 minutes. While tanking is not new, it had never been this widespread. The worst teams in the league losing games heralded a crisis of legitimacy that the NBA resolved to correct. On Tuesday, ESPN's Shams Charania reported on the league's strategy to fix tanking: Move it around so a different class of team has an incentive to tank. Per Charania, the NBA has held a bunch of meetings with the board of governors, the competition committee, and every general manager in the NBA over the past few months to talk through the various proposals it leaked last month. The owners will vote on it in a month, though both the substance of Charania's reporting (which is that "key points of the framework have a majority of the support from teams") and the fact of its publication through the league's willing mouthpiece make it seem likely that the new changes will be adopted ahead of next season. So what are they?

There is nothing about the Montreal Canadiens in their current iteration that causes a person to stop thinking about the team when it was the league's vibranium standard, which was nearly five decades ago. These Canadiens have always seemed somehow not it, whatever the "it" happens to be, and part of it might just be that they, like the other six Canadian franchises in the National Hockey League, have combined for no Stanley Cups in 33 years. But the cavalier term "these Canadiens" are also not "these Canadiens," as in this year's version. This year's version is in fact giving a face wash to all those notions, starting with, "You are what your anthem says you are." They have been paired in the first round with the ultra-experienced Tampa Bay Lightning, who have been the league’s signature playoff franchise for the last decade, all coached to the same stubborn standard by Jon Cooper, intractable by nature and in deed, while the Canadiens' recent history has been essentially to not be a playoff team at all. Even this one, better, faster, and defensively stouter, seemed a year too young to make the required April noise. And that's how being dead wrong in public works. The Habs won Game 5, 3-2, in a harrowing and taut struggle played largely in their end, and they won not by being cool and elegant and Franco-flashy but by winning the faceoffs and outhitting the larger and more playoff-built Bolts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKHDHAU2fJs

Donald Trump has a hang-up about Pluto. As far back as 2019, his appointed NASA administrator was making noise about reclassifying it as a planet, a status it lost when in 2006 the International Astronomical Union created a new system of nomenclature for all those weird and wacky bodies hurtling around the sun. Pluto, long a staple of the Big Nine and a famous childhood acrostic, was now a "mere" dwarf planet. Trump's back on his weird horse again, making noise about declaring Pluto a full-blown planet via executive order. This is not a thing that an executive order can do. This week, though, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman told a Senate committee hearing that he is “very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again.'" This is also not a thing NASA can do. The IAU does it. Isaacman knows this, and reached for a barely plausible mechanism: He referenced research papers that NASA is currently working on, and said "we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion." I do not think Isaacman actually cares about Pluto's status. I think he is remarkably shameless about kissing Trump's ass in order to let NASA receive sufficient funding to get on with its actual work. He's very good at that particular bit of key-jangling.

The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw it as a more spiritual story of alienation. Roeg initially wanted the main character, an extraterrestrial inventor, to be played by the 6-foot-9 sci-fi writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton, or Peter O’Toole, the beautiful manic adventurer of Lawrence of Arabia, before being persuaded to check out Cracked Actor, a tour documentary featuring a coked-out-of-his-gourd David Bowie. Through Bowie, Roeg transformed Tevis’s author surrogate into what Pauline Kael would call “a wilted stranger [who] can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood,” whose “lesbian-Christ-leering [and] forlorn, limp manner and chalky pallor are alluringly tainted.” In other words, he’s David Bowie as he was in 1976: Fashioning the character around the remnants of Bowie, the rock star from Mars of the Ziggy Stardust period, the film also shaped the zonked-out, esoteric magus Bowie of Station to Station and Low, which both use stills from the film for album covers. When a pop star appears in a movie, they deepen the movie by bringing everything we already know about their star persona to the role. The movie also deepens them, by giving them a platform to develop what we already know about that star persona in a visual and narrative medium, and to leave a bigger impression as they seem to bestride the entire cultural landscape.  The stakes of each impression—which is also the term in digital marketing for when a potential customer sees an online advertisement—have never been higher, as margins shrink in the culture industry. To put across a persona—or, as the current media-bestriding pop star now has us calling it, an “Era”—stars employ ever-larger teams of creative directors, stylists, videographers, and assistants. They carry the hopes of ever more label executives, brand and agency partners, and potential collaborators, not to mention potential collaborators’ teams, labels, and brand and agency partners.