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Doug Gottlieb’s a seasoned heel. He was a dependable ass on sports talk airwaves for years, then brought his ass act to the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay bench in 2024 when he got a coaching job—while still keeping his radio gig—and mentored his inaugural squad to a 4-28 record with an astounding 21-game losing streak.  But following a viral chair-toss episode after an early-season loss to Horizon League rival Robert Morris, Gottlieb made himself less interesting by giving up the shock-jock post and actually winning some games. His Phoenix took a 15-12 mark into Sunday's game with Milwaukee, a pretty good record at a school he himself would dub “Nobody U” if he wasn’t on the payroll.   Alas, Gottlieb put his ass hat back on and returned to the spotlight following his team’s 75-72 home loss. Gottlieb, whose team blew a six-point second-half lead, spent the postgame press conference profanely whining about officiating, conference leadership, and even schedulers. The peeved coach climaxed his tirade by attacking the table on the dais with the same venom he’d shown the chair in December. Why do you hate furniture, Doug? 

The various skeleton events wrapped up on Sunday, the Brits winning two of the three golds, Austria making away with the other, and the Germans sweeping the silvers and bronzes. However, fixating on the medal count obscures the most important contest of all: Who had the best helmet? As the controversy involving Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych suggests, skeleton helmets, like hockey goalie masks or Formula 1 helmets, are a part of the sport's aesthetic—and thus, political—culture. This is something to consider when you are choosing your sliding sport: Lugers may get to go feet-first, but they do not get painted helmets because, for whatever reason, they refuse to paint over the visors. What lugers gain in perceived safety, they lose in their ability to look sick as shit. Imagine foregoing the opportunity to look like this: Jung Seunggi of South Korea

Weeks after his flirty correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghislaine Maxwell was released for the world to see, Hollywood mogul, superagent, and Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee chairperson Casey Wasserman announced that he will sell his eponymous talent agency. In a Friday news-dump memo to the 4,000-odd Wasserman employees, the 51-year-old executive said, "I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort." The personal mistakes Wasserman references here include sending Maxwell a bunch of emails in 2003, when he was married to someone else, about seeing her "in a tight leather outfit" and "continu[ing] the massage concept into your bed," among other such constructions. But Wasserman was not just associated with Maxwell; he met her on Epstein's notorious private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express. Wasserman and his then-wife joined Epstein, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and others on a two-week "humanitarian" mission to Africa in 2002, a year earlier than any of the released emails from Wasserman to Maxwell. Wasserman is far from the only public figure to offer a tightly circumscribed apology for very specific conduct only to have to walk it back once further information came to light. Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House Counsel under Barack Obama, was able to retain her position at Goldman Sachs despite popping up in Epstein's emails back in November, listed on Epstein's schedule for a visit to his island in 2017, as well as having sent him a bunch of emails asking for travel advice. Her claim that she basically didn't know what was going on with Esptein crumbled when new emails emerged showing her advising the disgraced financier, whom she called "Uncle Jeff," on how to deal with the media after his 2019 sex-trafficking arrest. Ruemmler has reportedly agreed to depart Goldman Sachs later this year.

The most intriguing storyline in pro wrestling this month is not a title chase or a bloody feud, but whether or not fans are going to keep chanting "Fuck ICE" at shows. I am more than happy to explain this to you. What's your first question? To be honest, I think of pro wrestling the same way I think of NASCAR. Are the right-wing rednecks turning against ICE? I appreciate your honesty, but your information is out of date. Yes, if your main intersection with pro wrestling was the late-'90s boom on U.S. cable TV, then you definitely saw a product rife with misogyny and homophobia. But it's a much more inclusive hobby than it used to be, and I tell people who I want to convince to go to an independent show with me that they should expect something like a comic-con atmosphere, not a frat house. While every fandom has its jerks, I'm confident calling a wrestling show a safer space for queer people than a men's sporting event. Well, unless you're going to Saudi Arabia for a WWE show.

Is this the year when the good times finally end for the Philadelphia Phillies? Probably not. They've got stars all over the damn place, and to judge from years of vitriol you have to assume that by jettisoning Nick Castellanos, the Phillies have banked another 20 wins, easily. The loss of Ranger Suárez stings, I'm sure, but the Phillies still go at least six deep in trustworthy starting pitchers. Barring several disasters, the Phillies will contend for the crown of the punishing NL East. Still, at the start of spring training, this does not quite seem like the happy bunch of years past. Even if Castellanos's teammates are largely glad to be rid of his Bluetooth speaker and dugout brewskis, the circumstances of his departure are grody, and hint at a clubhouse culture vulnerable to idiosyncrasy and maybe a little pricklier and less relenting than you'd expect, given a team aesthetic that suggests a state university's very least reputable fraternity. Then there was the unexpected and somewhat ill-advised commentary of team president Dave Dombrowski, who pondered aloud in October whether Bryce Harper can be an elite player down the back stretch of the 13-year contract he signed with the club back in 2019. Harper had a down year in 2025, but only by his own standards: Despite struggling with a wrist injury, Harper finished in the league's 89th percentile in batting value, per Statcast. Dombrowski turned contemplative at the team's end-of-season presser, and seemed to express some doubt about Harper's value and longevity. "In Bryce's case, of course he's still a quality player, he's still an All Star-caliber player. He didn't have an elite season as he's had in the past, and I guess we only find out if he becomes elite or he continues to be good," said Dombrowski, in response to what turned out to be a very good prompt to explain how he evaluates Harper's 2025 performance and sets expectations for his star first-baseman's future. "It's not like he's—if you say to me, I look around the league, I was trying to think: Freddie Freeman. That's a really good player, right? He still is a good player. Is he elite like he was before? Probably not to the same extent. So that's nothing negative, because Freddie is a tremendous player, and that to me is Bryce. Can he rise to the next level again? I don't really know that answer. And really he's the one that will dictate that, more than anything else, is what it comes down to.

Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no fresh allegations of cheating curlers or references to serially violated hog lines; that mad Norwegian bastard who has mastered running uphill while wearing skis presumably picked up five or six more gold medals. The highlight of the FA Cup matches was remembering that the Wigan Athletic mascot is called Crusty The Pie, for the only valid reason. This left a window in the schedule for a little author time, and fortunately this was the day the local tavern was tapping its annual keg of Pliny The Younger, a supremely rare and extremely good locally made and nationally renowned craft beer. All it required from your correspondent was standing in the rain for half an hour, waiting for the doors of the bar to open, and finding a seat in the corner where nobody would ruin the vibe by sitting down nearby in an ill-considered attempt at strained conviviality. Beer is usually a communal activity, but for the Younger, even pathological loners get a day off from judgment. That last part of the plan sadly failed; the person in question here was actually quite tolerable and even borderline delightful, defying the well-worn stereotype that people are at their best when avoided. (If it helps, we never asked for a name and they never offered one, and good on them for that.) But the rest went to plan: the U.S.-Germany hockey game was on, the NBA All-Star Games were not, and the bar was filled with devoted day drinkers who finally had proper cover for their daily nooner.

Our Monday crossword? It’s good. This week's puzzle was constructed by Will Nediger and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a crossword constructor from London, Ontario who uses the nom de plume Bewilderingly (an anagram of "by Will Nediger"). Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.

As you may have heard, the twinned industries that produce art and criticism in this country are embattled. On every side, there is steady conglomeration, privatization, and the rapid uptake of labor-annihilating technology. In tandem, there has been a steady mainstreaming of an anti-intellectual attitude that finds criticism, particularly negative reviews, to be pretentious and without lasting cultural merit.  Reading A.S. Hamrah, the film critic at the magazine n+1 and a prolific writer on the history and trajectory of cinema at large, will convince you that criticism remains vital. For over two decades, Hamrah has honed an uncompromising, incisive voice, taking advantage of his rigorous and wide-ranging knowledge of the cinematic project so that no one film stands untethered from another. In recent years, amidst a media landscape that is overstuffed and underbaked, Hamrah has continued to chronicle the downward spiral of our time with unflinching clarity.   Two new books, Last Week in End Times Cinema and The Algorithm of the Night, collect select pieces of Hamrah’s film writing across various outlets from the past six years. As the reader moves through traditional reviews and longer ruminations on specific filmmakers and films, a novel historical document emerges, one that witnesses the degradation of an artform while also championing the independent and underground entities, whether individual people or larger movements, pushing back against a tide of slop and cookie-cutter cinema. 

In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to compete, the International Olympic Committee, in a daze, seemed to realize it was on the wrong side of history. The American Medical Association had recently come out against DNA testing in sports, and so had a formidable coalition of sports doctors, media commentators, Hillary Clinton, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and—not to be outdone—the entire national government of Norway. Even Olympic athletes themselves were railing against the chromosome tests, with an athletes’ commission recommending in 1998 that the Olympics drop their testing requirements. There was something frankly queasy about the whole DNA testing business, which the IOC had first embraced in the late 1960s, during the height of U.S. and USSR hostilities. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, the logic of DNA tests seemed woozier than ever. When the IOC announced it would ditch chromosome tests beginning in 2000, the Salt Lake City Tribune wrote that “an unfortunate vestige of the Cold War” had finally been eliminated. Everyone seemed prepared to move on; a member of the IOC’s medical commission declared that, soon, “gender testing will be gone forever.”   The sentiment sounds preposterous today. This month, as the world gathers for the Winter Olympics in Italy, chromosome tests have quietly returned—copy-pasted from the ‘90s, just with a new sheen. Sports officials are positioning the very DNA tests they had once left for dead as a “noninvasive” and “extremely accurate” way to protect “the integrity of female competition,” the new chosen euphemism for disqualifying trans and intersex women. The international federation that governs track-and-field events, World Athletics, and the boxing federation World Boxing recently announced that all women athletes in their sports will have to sit for a chromosome test.

Imagine yourself in the beautiful Dolomites of Cortina d'Ampezzo. The air is thin and cold. The stars blaze in the night sky above you. Inside your body is the kind of fear that empties you, that vibrates between your ears, that makes your heart pump so fast you think it might explode in your chest. You are standing at the top of the terrifying, beautiful, sliding track. It is made of solid, hard ice, just over a mile long, and contains 16 terrifying, sloping curves. In this imaginary scenario, you must get to the bottom of the track. You cannot walk down. You cannot scooch on your butt and cry. You must choose one of the approved Olympic methods for reaching the bottom of the course so that we can learn your true nature of your heart. How will you choose? Which of the several terrifying ways to get to the bottom of the course will you deem the least terrifying? What kind of person are you in the depths of your soul?