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It is once again time to have a staff chat. We'll be hanging out in the comments, ready to answer whatever questions you have. Update (3:17 p.m. ET): OK we're wrapping up here! Thanks for joining, everyone.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.  The testimony was part of a bellwether trial in California in which a 20-year-old woman, referred to in the trial as K.G.M. or "Kaley," alleges that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive and that her addiction to Instagram and YouTube specifically contributed to the degradation of her mental health. Meta's lawyers argue that the mental health problems she suffered as an adolescent were caused by separate trauma and abuse. So far, the trial has hinged mainly on the question of whether social-media addiction is possible, from a psychiatric perspective. Meta is arguing that there is a difference between "problematic" and "clinically addictive" usage, and that the company and Zuckerberg are not responsible for negative mental health outcomes produced or exacerbated by extreme use of their platforms. Meanwhile, YouTube is arguing that it simply isn't a social media platform at all, despite its pushes in recent years into short form video that looks an awful lot like Instagram and TikTok, as well as photo-based posts.

A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the draw was Victor Wembanyama. We wanted a first-person glimpse of the 7-foot-5 alien. This plan settled on the edges of my mind until the conclusion of the NBA's All-Star break, after which it took on a new intensity. Beginning in mid-February, my brain regularly cycled through Wemby-centric thoughts as I went about my day-to-day: I hope I get to see Victor Wembanyama. I wonder how many sick dunks Victor Wembanyama will throw down. What's Victor Wembanyama doing right now? There was a brief moment of panic when I realized San Antonio was playing back-to-back nights on this Eastern road trip, with the stop in Brooklyn as the second leg. Would the Spurs rest him against the hapless Nets? Thankfully, they did not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZt95TcRIrU

In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it will abandon its efforts in the face of Paramount's hostile takeover bid, leaving Paramount and the Ellison family in possession of a massive swath of American cultural production and free to make it as poisonous as they please. WBD started walking down this road when it announced plans to unbuckle the two halves of its business from each other last summer. In this the venerable entertainment company was simply following Comcast's lead, and not really intending to sell either its movie studio and streaming businesses or its cash-generating yet debt-saddled TV "global networks business"—but once the Ellison family bought Paramount, the WBD board clearly saw an opportunity to get a little bidding war going, and put a big For Sale sign out on the front lawn. WBD's board initially went with Netflix's proposal despite the streaming giant offering less cash than Paramount, because Netflix had agreed to buy only the streaming stuff whereas Paramount wanted everything. Netflix agreed to pay $72 billion, or $27.75 per share, yet WBD's internal math reportedly valued the bid at closer to $31–32 per share, since WBD shareholders would get to hold onto some equity. Paramount wanted to pay cash for everything, and offered $30 per share at the launch of its hostile takeover. In its appeal to WBD shareholders, Paramount said the Netflix deal "offers inferior and uncertain value and exposes WBD shareholders to a protracted multi-jurisdictional regulatory clearance process." This was less a friendly warning than a threat. What it meant was: The Ellison family's close personal friend Donald Trump is not going to let this deal through.

I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one of the world’s elite readers, as you should. There’s just one problem. I’m also reading Paper, by Mark Kurlansky. And Island of the Blue Foxes, by Stephen Brown. And Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedegwick. And a dozen other books too, all at the same time. I also paused in the middle of reading all of those books to read, in its entirety, a history of The Cars, even though I was never that into The Cars. Reading that book led me to reading an entire oral history of MTV’s first decade on the air, which led me to reading an entire oral history of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the 1980s. Oh and after that, I finally started in on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, which I’m definitely gonna finish before I return to all of those other books I’m reading, like the first one I mentioned. The Power Broker. I think that was the name of it. I’ll get back around to Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-winner eventually. For now though, it sits in my Kindle library, sharing low completion percentages with multiple other tomes, some of which I haven’t picked back up in years. I also have a pile of somewhat-read dead-tree books stacked next to my nightstand. That pile used to rest on my nightstand before it grew too tall and wobbly. Now it serves as its own little extra nightstand in our bedroom. Sometimes I throw a t-shirt onto it.

The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors and attitudes a secret, even going to court to defend their right to keep their respective and collective sweatshop prerogatives private. Or at the very least, they sued to prevent the NFL Players Association from releasing the results of its annual players survey, which gave letter grades to the league's 32 rendering plants. Yeah, that secret kept well. A story by our much beloved and stealthy Comrade Emeritus Kahler, currently slumming it at ESPN, released part of the survey anyway, because every secret is just a whisper to be amplified later. What results she provided indicated that the Miami Dolphins are the best team to work for, provided you're not picky about your mood on Sunday evening. The Fish were rated for the third year running as the team that provides the best working environment, and yet their results remain deeply in the meh-to-feh range; with most projections for the 2026 season putting them in the rank-to-stank range, they'd better keep the thread count up in those table linens.

On Thursday night, in the season finale of The Traitors, two former Love Island contestants locked eyes across the round table. In the face of Maura Higgins you could see a dangerous hope growing—as if, for the first time, she could imagine what winning would be like. Here she was, at the end of a long game of strategy and deceit and maybe... just maybe... she had played well enough. She glanced at Rob Rausch across from her, whose body under his overalls looked truly relaxed for the first time all season, and believed that they might have done it together. And he looked at her with glee in his eyes, knowing that she was so deeply, terribly wrong. She mistook it for a shared joy in winning. "I'm sorry," she joked, pausing for emphasis. "I'm a faithful." "Oh fuck," he said. And then he tells her that he's not, that he's lied to her for weeks, crept about, and twisted the play of the game around his little finger until the whole world they lived inside was controlled entirely by him. "Maura, I am and I always have been... a traitor."

If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” painted above its door. And if you had decided to go in, there was a decent chance you’d know the person working the counter. This part of town is on the up; the adjacent building was sitting empty and in disrepair for at least 15 years, but it recently became a Turkish textile and loungewear shop. Down the street is an artisanal cheese store. Two spots up is a Taco Bell—gentrification does not scare the Taco Bell—but if you were hungry, you could always try the photo shop, where there were sometimes donuts around for the taking.  Even those who have never been to LA might have been familiar with Eagle Rock Camera & Goods, which opened in 2023, because it was regularly advertised to the 450,000 Instagram followers of the store’s proprietor, pro skater turned actor turned fine-art photographer Jason Lee. You could buy analog cameras or photo books at the shop. If you’re like me, you could browse in order to motivate yourself to dig your old film camera out of the closet. Or you could just hang out, talk art, and make friends. “It’s kind of a little local community hang spot as much as it is a retail store,” Lee told me while sitting on a couch in the back of the shop, next to a refrigerator filled with film available for purchase.  Some of those who recognize Lee from his acting may reasonably hesitate at the offer of a pastry or treat; one of Lee’s most famous bits, from Kevin Smith’s 1995 movie Mallrats, is when his character Brodie rubs his hand in his asscrack before giving a nemesis a chocolate-covered pretzel. These are the types of roles that made Lee an omnipresent face in a certain sector of Gen X cinematic malaise: He would play invariably scruffy, wise-ass sarcasm machines banking on their charm to guide them through the world. Their names were Earl, or Banky, or Beaver, and they tended to capture an idealistic form of degeneracy—one in which a lack of ambition didn’t reflect a lack of latent intelligence.

When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don't know the long-term psychological consequences of fame for child stars like Moo Deng. Then I saw a video of the seven-month-old Japanese macaque Punch dragging his Djungelskog IKEA orangutan toy, and instantly felt my heart swell. It is difficult, I fear, to stave off the pangs of emotion that come when watching a baby monkey—a primate just like us—appear totally alone, clinging to a stuffed toy while he watches the other inhabitants of his enclosure hold and groom each other. When I watched videos of Punch dragging his Djungelskog to yet another empty corner, I felt impossibly sad. This sorrowful saga has traveled far and wide. When Punch-kun the Japanese macaque was born in July in the Ichikawa City Zoo, his mother abandoned him. This sounds cruel, but it is known to happen under certain circumstances. In this case, she was a first-time mother who gave birth during a heat wave, making for a stressful labor. "In environments where survival is threatened from outside stress, mothers may prioritize their own health and future reproduction rather than continue to care for an infant whose health may be compromised by those environmental conditions," Alison Behie, a primatology expert at Australian National University, told The Guardian. Without a mother, Punch needed someone, or something, to which he could attach. As Ichikawa City zookeeper Kosuke Shikano told The Guardian, baby Japanese macaques cling to their mothers after birth, both to build muscle strength and to feel a sense of security. But Punch, left alone, had no one to hold. After the keepers attempted to give him several towels, they offered him the Djungelskog, which had the added benefit of looking like a monkey. Punch immediately attached.

You know the thing that the truly great rim protectors do in basketball, where they learn they can alter shots by aura alone? The area under the basket becomes a Sarlacc pit, the remote and terrifying domain of a very large, patient, and hungry creature. The great ones are happy, thrilled even, to welcome a meal. They learn to stop jumping out and using their body to cut off ball-handlers and take charges, because they've seen the advantages they can sometimes gain by inviting drives, by baiting some fool into taking another dribble, into dreaming of scoring at the basket. Victor Wembanyama has advanced to another plane, to what his opponents will have to hope is the ultimate stage of rim-protection dominance: He appears to be developing the no-look shot-block. He had an eye-popping one of these Wednesday, in a road win over the Toronto Raptors. Wembanyama refused to leave a darting and cutting Collin Murray-Boyles, down in the dunker spot, in order to deter a drive from Scottie Barnes, who was isolating against a size mismatch. Barnes is Toronto's best player; Murray-Boyles, God love him, is just some guy, some well-meaning rookie fella. The book is pretty clear on this matter: Go ahead and leave Collin Murray-Boyles, send help at Barnes, zone up the weak side, and force the Raptors away from the basket. Wembanyama has his own damn book, a grimoire containing secrets of the darkest defensive magic. Instead of leaving Murray-Boyles, Wembanyama fully turned his head and back to the court and faced into the stands, showing no sign of even noticing Barnes's attempted dunk until the Raptors forward was already in the air. Then, whoa hey, suddenly a huge hand was flying in and slapping the ball out of there. Wembanyama looked almost irritated at Barnes, like he'd rudely interrupted something, as if what the Frenchman really did want to do on that possession was closely observe the movement patterns of his undersized counterpart. The ball raced back the other way, and the Spurs jogged into an open transition three-pointer.