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Arsenal's blunt-object dominance of the Premier League has given non-Gooners little to enjoy this season. It's not much fun to watch a team set-piece and defend its way to a title, even if the whole point of soccer is to win games by any means necessary. I don't have to like it, and I don't have to respect it, but Mikel Arteta has cracked the code that has eluded so many previous Arsenal sides: score more goals than you concede. I know, real rocket surgery here, but Arsenal has almost entirely abandoned the aesthetic pursuits the club used to hang its hat on in favor of a win-at-all-costs mentality that has earned the club disdain and points in almost equal measure this season. Of course, if it were not for the so-called haramball deployed by Arteta and his band of soon-to-be Premier League champions, would Max Dowman's maiden Premier League goal have hit quite as sweetly as it did on Saturday? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yK6-zQsjM

On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really, good on the red carpet. This year, the big winner of the red carpet was the brooch. I would say that these are not your grandmother's brooches, but they quite literally are your grandmother's broaches. The hottest men (and some women) in Hollywood are pinning butterflies and shrimps and flowers to the lapels of their coats just so that the light catches them and shines. It was not the first time that brooches have appeared on the Academy Awards red carpet—fashion icon and beautiful man Colman Domingo has been wearing them for years to Hollywood events—but this year they reached saturation. Every big leading man, it seemed, had a brooch on, and if they didn't have one on at the award show, they sure-as-hell had one on at the after-parties. Let's look at a few of the best from Sunday night's awards. Here is a close up of Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, at the Vanity Fair afterparty, and look at those stunning, star shaped brooches on his lapel. I love the addition of the pink one as a little pop of color. The placement of all three in a triangle also mirrors the triangles created by the suit jacket and the lapel itself, which I find very satisfying.

There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critically acclaimed work for so long that eventually, usually 10 or more years after your true prime, the Academy will reward you in part to right past wrongs—the Martin Scorsese way. Sunday night, Paul Thomas Anderson became the latest filmmaker to get the pseudo lifetime achievement Oscar when One Battle After Another won six awards, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. It's not that One Battle is a bad movie or a lesser work, but it is one of those clear inflection points in a lengthy career, one that allowed the Academy to celebrate a director that it had mostly ignored up until now. The Academy has always kinda worked like this, torn between crowning a new generation—seen this year with Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor and Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman to win Best Cinematography—and feting the older one for their years of service. As a fan of Anderson's work, I've long thought he was overdue for more recognition from the Academy. There Will Be Blood is his most obvious masterpiece and was well positioned to get him a statue, though it had the unfortunate luck to go up against the Coen brothers' similarly masterful No Country For Old Men. The Master won the Oscar of my heart, but it was much too strange and polarizing for the Academy's infamously bland taste. For Phantom Thread, his last true five-star film, the award-season narrative was more about Daniel Day-Lewis's one last ride than Anderson. To go back even further, Boogie Nights was one of those movies that marked him as a potential Oscar-winner in the future but, like The Master, was too out there for the Academy to award it in the moment, while Magnolia seemed designed to simultaneously chase and repel the Oscar. As far as a late-period work goes, I maintain that One Battle is a rich text that can be thrilling and confounding all at once. In that way it does feel akin to The Departed, the one that finally got Scorsese his little gold man. They're two movies that show what's great about their directors as well as what can be frustrating, and I think both movies will only grow in critical estimation as time goes on.

Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly by galling margins. Now that losing is exactly what they need to do, they have turned into an accidental juggernaut, proving in the process that the essence of incompetence in the NBA is not losing so much as it is a lack of cohesive vision. Amid all the anxiety about tanking, the Kings stand as a potent counterexample to the notion that the practice is simple and thoughtless. It is, as they demonstrate, something you can be bad at. One aspect of the aforementioned anxiety about tanking that I find to be misplaced is the idea that fans of tanking teams are necessarily experiencing anguish because their teams are losing. This imagines the fan as a sort of noble savage, conceiving of poor Wizards or Jazz fans as confounded at the idea of trying to get the first overall pick in the draft. Fans aren't stupid, and while the experience of paying American dollars to go watch Micah Potter hoist 11 threes doesn't carry the same thrill as getting to watch a good team, not only do ticket prices reflect the ugliness of the hoops on offer, I think fans of any team that's been rewarded for tanking (read: every team except Miami) would tell you that sacrificing a few months of faux-competitive basketball for an All-NBA talent is more than worth it. There is a marshmallow test here, and whether you find the incentive structure of tanking gross, there's no disputing that it works. But I am a fan of a tanking team and I am experiencing anguish, because the Kings are winners of four of their last five games and six of their last 11. This is surprising for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that this hot streak began the moment the Kings sent their "good" players away for the season. Funny as it is that the theoretical core of the team was holding it back, the departures of Zach LaVine and Domantas Sabonis for season-ending surgeries cleared the way for DeMar DeRozan to dribble the basketball for 18 seconds before hoisting a contested midrange jumper and for Russell Westbrook to sprint around and run into people. That stuff does not help you win games that matter, but it's great for punishing bad opponents.

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Oman, has been effectively closed for over two weeks, since the United States and Israel began their war of aggression against the nation of Iran and Iran responded by, in part, warning ships that passage of the strait would not be permitted and attacking some of those that tried to pass through it. This is a big deal, as you likely know: A critical portion of the world's petroleum and liquid natural gas passes through the strait on its way from the Middle East to basically everywhere else. Oil and energy prices have spiked, turning an immoral and multiply illegal war that was unpopular from the outset into a political cataclysm for its perpetrators. None of this had to happen. By all available reporting and the variably coherent statements of various officials, nothing in particular precipitated this war other than power being in the hands of the wrong people in the U.S. and Israel and those people deciding, for reasons they cannot explain and may not really understand, Hey, let's attack Iran. Now that it is happening, it is not so easily ended except on terms that will only add harm to the bloodthirsty morons who elected to start it. It's quite a pickle. The aggressor nations of course did not anticipate this, or in any event failed to plan for it. That is because they are run by some of the dumbest losers ever to live, a grade of men who are bad at both anticipation and planning due to having no theory of the minds of others and only the most rudimentary inkling of an idea that other people even have minds. Because of this incuriosity and ignorance they are continually caught flat-footed by other people behaving as anything more than simple buttons to press. In a nutshell, this is the problem. With, in a nutshell, basically everything currently happening in the world.

March Madness means it's time to get invested in random schools from places you've never been, and after the bracket reveals on Sunday, I'd like to offer a potential rooting interest: the Saint Louis Billikens men's team. Based indeed in Missouri and not some off-brand St. Louis (à la Oakland University), you may faintly recall the Billikens for their quirky mascot and their three straight first-round tournament wins in the 2010s. This is their first appearance since a loss as a 13 seed in 2019, however, so please allow me to acquaint you with this squad and give you five reasons to care about them. Reason No. 1: The Billikens just played two very exciting games. Look, I'm not going to pretend I was living and dying with Saint Louis basketball this year, but I did tune in for their pair of games in the Atlantic 10 tournament, and I liked what I saw. Saint Louis entered the week as the top seed, but they were sliding in sideways. They started the year 24-1, with the lone loss coming by one point to Stanford, but they went just 3-3 in their last six, with their final regular-season game a brutal 29-point blowout by George Mason.

It must have been surreal and thrilling for Fernando Alonso to find himself in a points position moments after the start of the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. That Aston Martin he's driving is a worthless piece of crap, but because half the grid has still not figured out how to work the start of a race with the new engine regulations, there's a particularly crazy frenetic scramble when the lights drop. This time Alonso shot from 18th, where he'd qualified, all the way up to 10th. Imagine it: That awful car, that contemptible rattling disaster, soaring into the points. Baby, you're a firework! It could not last. First of all, apart from everything else wrong with it, the Aston Martin is not very fast. Alonso was back in 13th a lap later, and then 14th, and then 15th. He stayed out during the safety car caused by the inevitable failure of his teammate's car, but the decision lifted him only into 11th. When the racing fired up again, all the freshened cars blew by, and then the real indignities began. Alonso was passed on lap 15 by Serio Pérez, driving a Cadillac that for all its competitive relevance might as well have wood side-panelling and a kayak slung overhead. The new overtake mode has so far encouraged a lot of reciprocal overtaking, and so Alonso was soon able to scoot past Pérez, but he couldn't hold the spot, and the two went back and forth for a bit, contesting their own sad little sideshow down there at the back of the pack. During one of Pérez's overtakes, Alonso offered a friendly little wave to his veteran opponent. Nice to see you! This would not be the only time that Alonso took his hands from his steering wheel. Aston Martin has not yet solved the terrible engine vibrations that rattle its car to pieces. Lance Stroll was spared the suffering caused by this jack-hammer action when his own car crapped out early, but Alonso's car continued to propel itself forward and so he bravely held out for more than 30 laps, without a normally timed pit stop to give his poor battered mitts a rest. The vibrating picked up around lap 20 and soon became severe. "It was difficult today, we found more vibrations than any other session of the weekend," Alonso said after the race. "I started to lose the feeling in my hands and my feet, so it was not a nice feeling."

Make yourself at home and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Dan Zarin and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan is a crossword constructor and freelance writer based in Portland, Maine. Over the years he has been a musician, a hitchhiker, a barista, an advertising copywriter and a food critic, so making puzzles seemed like the next logical step. 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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1.

Team USA had an uninspiring showing during pool play at this year's World Baseball Classic, and thanks to manager Mark DeRosa's struggles with math, needed a little bit of luck to make it to the quarterfinals. But now, after victories over Canada and the Dominican Republic, the Americans are headed to the final. Perhaps they have former SEAL Team Six member Robert O'Neill to thank for their good run of form. O'Neill visited the players in the locker room at some point before Friday's 5-3 victory over Canada. A snippet of O'Neill's pep talk, which featured him detailing the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden with all the panache of a coworker recapping his weekend, was posted online before Friday's game. O'Neill, who claims to have shot and killed bin Laden, was an odd choice for locker-room motivator given what he's been up to since leaving the armed forces more than a decade ago. O'Neill is part of a cohort of former special forces operators who spend all of their time writing books and making podcast appearances in which they accuse each other of lying about their service records. He is also the guy who tweeted "You’re not men. You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines," at a group of young male Kamala Harris voters in 2024. He has been banned from Delta Airlines and arrested for DUI, public intoxication, and misdemeanor assault. His tweets remain awful. Team USA applied O'Neill's lessons in a two-run victory over Canada on Friday, and then emerged from Sunday's tense, highly competitive game against the Dominican Republic with a 2-1 win. Paul Skenes started for the Americans, working around a Junior Caminero solo shot in the second inning to hold the Dominicans' stacked lineup to just six hits and one run in 4.1 innings. Team USA struck back in the fourth inning with solo homers from Gunnar Henderson and Roman Anthony, and then it was time for a procession of meaty boys to emerge from the bullpen and protect Team USA's lead.

It is difficult to be a conscientious viewer of Formula 1, a sport which occurs in discrete windows, not all that frequently, and on tracks with their own variable characteristics that can skew results any which way. To be specific, any possible conclusion to be made off the back of the Chinese Grand Prix that took place Sunday in the wee hours of Eastern Daylight Time is negotiating a sample size of two races, and should be treated as such. And with that disclaimer disclaimed: Mercedes is running away with the championship. Spectators who watched F1 prior to 2021 will be familiar with the horrors of watching two Mercedes cars finish a race well over 10 seconds ahead of the nearest car. There was the infamous HAM BOT VER—Lewis Hamilton, Valtteri Bottas, Max Verstappen—podium trio that defined 2020, and then HAM ROS VET—Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, Sebastian Vettel—before that. Worse, Mercedes rarely had or has the decency to be affected by internal beeves with any sort of consistency, especially when the team starts a season firing on all cylinders. Even one of the most noxious teammate pairings in F1 history, Hamilton and Rosberg, couldn't break the stalwart Mercedes winning machine. If there is potential for some upset to the Mercedes formula, it will be on slower circuits later in the season. And it is not unheard for a team to make major gains even midway through a single season, as McLaren did back in 2023. Indeed, Ferrari look to have a couple of upgrades in the pipeline that the team aggressively trotted out to test during the Chinese GP. But to seriously contend in the championship, those upgrades would have to be fully ready sooner rather than later.