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There is nothing that sucks the life out of a good time like someone self-consciously asking whether you are having fun. Maybe a moment ago, you were having fun, but now, faced with their anxiety (or worse, their reassurance that certainly you are having a good time, maybe even the best you've ever had), your attention is diverted to them: the fear in this other person's eyes and their terror that it might not be everything they hoped it would be. Whatever fun was in the air is sucked out by the insistence that there is so much of it. That is how it feels to watch the 50th season of Survivor. As the first season with returning players in almost a decade, producers for Survivor 50 should be able to rely on the cast to create drama, intrigue, and mess. The players should be allowed to sabotage each other and ruin one another's opportunities. That is, after all, the point of the game. But instead of allowing the players to play, Survivor 50 has become a cautionary tale in over-production. Take the most recent episode as an example. The players have fully merged into one tribe. They have alliances and plans, hidden idols and secret enemies. If left alone, one assumes they would quickly turn on one another and create sufficient drama. But instead of letting this all play out for the viewer, long-time host and now showrunner Jeff Probst spends every episode insisting we are about to see "the biggest twist in Survivor history" or "the most dramatic tribal council in Survivor history." Maybe, but please ... shut up about it!

Mary Bennet, middle of five, has few virtues to recommend her. Unlike her eldest sister, Jane, she is not beautiful. Nor is she witty, like second-eldest Elizabeth. Her younger sister, Kitty, may be frivolous, but at least she is good-humored and has a fun nickname. Youngest daughter Lydia, meanwhile, is disastrously reckless, but you can’t deny she has spirit. Although one might think Jane Austen, bookish and unwed as she was, would draw Mary with some degree of sympathy, she describes her in Pride and Prejudice as having “neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” Ouch. Mary is not the most obvious candidate to helm a romantic comedy, and yet the Jane Austen Industrial Complex—this is how I tend to think of the interminable production of books, films, tv shows, and other ephemera that bear some relation to the author and her works—is in constant need of new material. Eventually, someone would notice Mary over there in the corner, reading a book about rocks. And thank god for that, because the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister (adapted from Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel of the same name) is a rare treasure: an Austen-ish adaptation that actually justifies its own existence. The first three episodes became available in the U.S. via BritBox on May 6, with subsequent episodes releasing weekly. There are 10 altogether, each coming in at a delightful 30 minutes. 

Pastor Mark Burns, the president's informal "spiritual advisor," wants to make one thing very clear about the extremely tall gold statue of Donald Trump that was officially dedicated last week in Doral, Miami. "Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone," he wrote on Twitter. He's technically right, just as Rene Magritte was technically right that his painting of a pipe was not actually a pipe. In the most literal sense, the statue of Trump, which is named "Don Colossus" is not a golden calf. Despite the president calling it "The Real Deal - GOLD," on Truth Social, the statue is not made of gold. Unlike the golden calf, which was made from melting the jewelry of the Egyptians, the Trump statue is not actually made of solid gold. "Don Colossus" is cast in bronze and covered in gold leaf, making it much, much less valuable. It is also obviously not a calf, as calves are baby cows, and the statue is certainly not a baby cow.

When the bell rang to signal the 10th round of the Fabio Wardley-Daniel Dubois heavyweight fight for the WBO world title, a bloodied Wardley rose from his stool and walked off-balance to center ring, as if taking his first steps. The night began well for him: He fired an overhand right that sent Dubois clattering to the floor just 12 seconds in, then forced Dubois to take a knee in round three with another shot to the top of the head. But virtually all of Wardley’s other punches missed by miles, thrown along comically vicious, errant arcs. Dubois used his faster, harder jab and right hand to batter Wardley’s face into that of a grotesque clown: one eye fused shut, his nose an angry, shiny red.  Referee Howard Foster could have stopped the fight when Dubois repeatedly staggered Wardley at the end of round six, and Wardley’s corner could have thrown in the towel in any of the many moments after when their fighter was out on his feet, taking alarmingly clean punches, or simply too awash in blood. Wardley’s legendary punch resistance had piloted him to two come-from-behind knockouts in recent fights. Here, it betrayed him as he refused to go down, only wobbling or freezing momentarily after Dubois hit him. “Fabio Wardley’s chin deserves a knighthood,” one of the commentators declared at one point. If the Order of the British Empire wishes to grant the honor, it’ll have to be to the memory of Wardley’s durability. Beatings more merciful than this, which is almost all of them, have ruined lives, much less chins.  To think the fight week narratives all centered around Dubois’s vulnerabilities. In 2023, he suffered an eighth-round KO loss to Oleksandr Usyk. After rebounding with three increasingly impressive wins, including a demolition of Anthony Joshua, Dubois took on Usyk again and didn’t make it out of the fifth round. He has always seemed a bit more skittish and afraid in the hard moments of a fight than similar talents. Mix that with his painfully awkward presence on camera, and you have a constant source of headlines. 

There was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for. As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were about when you were a man in an unhappy marriage. Sometimes you were English and sometimes you were a college professor and sometimes you worked in The Business Industry, but that was about the size of things as far as I could tell. Some of these books, which I read and at some level enjoyed and admired very much, doubtless hold up; I am also surely being a little rude or just unfair to your Saul Bellow types, who were writing more about how it feels or what it means to be a man in an unhappy marriage. But even when that was what I understood this work to be, and what I wanted to do with my life, there was something that felt confining about it. This was not just because I had not yet had many or any of the experiences that these books lavished over and raged against, although I'm sure that didn't help. But the idea that this was all there was—all that unhappy grown-up stuff, over and over, unfolding in spaces I mostly recognized from other such stories—didn't feel right to me. To be clear, that in no way meant that I'd given up on the idea of pacing anxiously through those very same halls for the rest of my life; I didn't give up on being a great American novelist until I'd been out of school for nearly a decade, although what first felt like a personal identity crisis quickly declined into something much more like relief. But I think it explains, in retrospect, why the books I read that kicked holes in those familiar walls or just declined to make the gestures I'd come to expect felt so thrilling and vital to me. I had been so busy and so serious in examining the fixtures and finishes and clever design elements in those rooms that I hadn't realized how claustrophobic it felt in there, and how thin that recycled air had become.

The WNBA season begins tonight. Rather than preview each team, I've decided to look at some storylines I’ll be following through some of the league's best characters. This has nothing to do with the fact that I only came back from book leave on Thursday and didn't have a lot of time to write a preview. In fact, working on a book has merely pushed me to consider alternative narrative dimensions and explore new modes of storytelling, such as this. Napheesa Collier Looms Large

To watch the Detroit Pistons is to marvel at the highest level of team defense being played anywhere in the NBA. The mental strain they induce in opponents is remarkable, as offenses will cycle through primary, secondary, and tertiary options with increasing mania, unable to engineer anything open despite putting the Pistons deep in rotation. They fly around the perimeter, making dozens of cascading collective decisions despite scant time or space to communicate with each other. It's a sight to behold, one whose only statistical echo is what they've done to poor, overmatched James Harden's two-game box score: nine made field goals, 11 turnovers, and 1-for-11 three-point shooting. The theory of this most recent Harden trade was that Cleveland wanted a regular-style point guard to relieve Donovan Mitchell of his playmaking burden, further unlock their imposing yet stodgy pair of bigs, and do so without totally compromising their defense. It's not often that Harden, one of the league's premier stander-arounders, is thought of as anything better than a total traffic cone on that end of the court, but Darius Garland is tiny and way more easily picked on. Harden wants to play slow and control the offense from the top of the key, and the idea is that he can apply constant pressure with his pull-up and foul-baiting abilities. Those who watched Harden fall apart at the end of the playoffs in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2017, 2015, or 2013 will not be surprised to learn that it's not going too well. The Pistons have Harden in hell. His defense has been as mediocre as expected, but the really concerning aspect of his play has been his invisibility on offense. Other than the fourth quarter of Game 1, Harden has not been able to get to the basket. Detroit surprised many when they began that game with Cade Cunningham on Harden. With Ausar Thompson spending most of his time on Mitchell duty, the only way for the Pistons to simultaneously insulate Duncan Robinson and keep their guards out of size mismatches was to begin with their superstar on Harden. He's done a great job, though defending in the playoffs is a team endeavor, and Detroit has pressured Harden ridiculously well. Some of his turnovers have come while trying to kick out into collapsing passing lanes, but mostly he has crapped himself while being defended one-on-one.

Days before the second Clásico of the La Liga season, the Real Madrid locker room is reportedly falling apart. Courtesy of a running faucet of leaks that has been spraying since early on Thursday, it is clear that the club is suffering from some kind of internal civil war. The matter truly came to a head, so to speak, in the form of a physical confrontation between midfielders Aurélien Tchouaméni and Federico Valverde, the result of which sent Valverde to the hospital to be treated for a head injury. Beyond the pretty well-established broad outline of the situation, though, specifics and clarity have been hard to come by. And so anyone searching for more details from the assortment of reports coming out all over the Spanish media must venture in the land of soccer news aggregators, where EMPHASIS is KING and PEOPLE are FORGETTING THINGS all the time. https://twitter.com/themadridzone/status/2052442550380658831?s=46 Now, just because these kinds of aggregators are not themselves the most trustworthy sources of information, that doesn't mean there's no fire underneath all the smoke. As evidenced by the various sources cited by both Madrid Zone and Madrid Xtra, the two primary English-language aggregators of Real Madrid news, these reports do come from somewhere. Aggregators don't exactly make things up, but rather they are usually happy to post any and all truths, half-truths, and baseless speculation, so long as it emerges first from someone in the notoriously inconsistent and unreliable soccer media industrial complex. This makes for a hallucinogenic experience when something like "Two Real Madrid players might have had a fistfight that left one with TEMPORARY AMNESIA" comes into play. It was evident from the start that something had happened between Tchouaméni and Valverde, a fact that was confirmed by an official statement from the club late on Thursday, but it was also evident that most of the reporting that would come out about it would be contradictory, speculative, and incomplete.

The following is excerpted from A Fraction of a Point: A Gymnastics Dynasty on the Line, by Nina Mandell. Published by Kent State University Press. Reproduced with permission. The book is available for purchase now.  With the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School gymnastics team’s state win streak at five years old, Andrea Kinzer stood over her teammate Diana Moock, watching her as she sat on the ground calculating the scores from other teams across the meet. Diana, a numbers whiz with the nickname "the human calculator," was furiously computing the scores of the competition that the team had gathered through their intel sources. Brecksville had an advantage: The order of events was randomly decided and in their draw that year, they went after Magnificat. But there was bad news: After completing her quick math, Diana looked at the team. "We need to upgrade our skills," she said.

World Cup tickets are absurdly expensive and everyone is mad about it. Non-American fans seem to have been priced out of the tournament, judging by the lack of hotel reservations being made in host cities, and even FIFA Peace Prize recipient Donald Trump thinks things have gotten out of hand. "I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you," Trump told the New York Post when alerted to the fact that tickets to the USMNT's opening game are selling for upwards of $1,000. FIFA is to blame for this, as the organization can set face-value ticket prices however it pleases. The top ticket price for this year's final is more than $10,000, whereas a similar ticket for the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar cost $1,600. According to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, these extortionist prices aren't actually the result of FIFA's own choices, but of the nefarious American custom of ticket reselling. Infantino spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, and had this to say for himself: