NowLoop

In The Christophers, Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a painter hired by a pair of bumbling siblings for an odd sort of job. They want her to go work for their father, a renowned artist named Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who has largely shunned the art world, spending his waning days being the Simon Cowell on an obscene reality show called Art Fight and recording Cameo messages to fans for lunch money. What Julian’s kids really want, though, is for Lori to put her skills to work secretly forging a set of paintings to complete their father’s great masterwork, a long-running series of portraits called “the Christophers.” Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon, what starts as a con movie quickly morphs into something far more delicate and layered. Staged as a kind of a two-hander, and largely confined to the narrow spaces of Julian’s multi-level London home, the flamboyant, witty painter quickly susses out that the young forger has more to her than mere interest in a job, though her plan eludes him. Testing and prodding her, the two begin a contentious dialogue about pouring themselves into art and having their relationship to it transformed by the public’s—sometimes harsh—reaction. Solomon’s funny, lively, florid, and moving script wrestles directly with what it means to lose touch with the reasons people make art in the first place. The film examines how the artist persona can distract from a real sense of purpose, embittering artists in the process. It’s a film about the painful realities that often stop artists in their tracks. It’s also a film about legacies, both positive and negative, and the complicated give-and-take of artistic inspiration. All of it anchored by unfussy, clear-eyed direction from Soderbergh, and a pair of incredible performances from Coel and McKellen, whose interplay feels like watching an acting masterclass.

By any objective reckoning, Bayern Munich should've been considered enormous favorites to beat Real Madrid in their Champions League quarterfinal matchup. Bayern has been one of the two best teams in Europe all season long, while Real has been consistently bad. Bayern's star-studded attack has been firing on all cylinders, cranking out flatly outrageous stats in both domestic and continental play, while Real still hasn't figured out how to build an engine out of its assortment of top-of-the-line parts that unfortunately seem to each belong to completely different car makes. In the first leg of this tie, Bayern took home a hard-fought and well-earned 2-1 win, and had the benefit of playing the second leg at home, inside the cauldron that is the Allianz Arena. Coming into Wednesday's decisive game, there was really no logical reason to think we'd see any other result than Bayern going through. And yet, if there is one team and one competition where objectivity and logic hold no sway, it's Real Madrid in the Champions League. History, especially of the recent sort, is littered with examples of Real having no rational basis for winning a tie that they inevitably win. Call it black magic, the Twilight Zone, the Spirit of Juanito, or whatever you want—there is real evidence to support the longstanding, widespread belief that some kind of mysterious force allows this particular club to pull off preposterous upsets and comebacks in this particular tournament. Real or not, the belief in this power can itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy, emboldening Blancos to keep pushing despite long odds, and heaping anxiety on opponents who might see in a single unlucky bounce an omen of impending, predestined doom. Indeed, Wednesday's match in Munich opened with one such unlucky bounce that seemed to indicate that the old black magic was once again in the air. But, fortunately for fans of the German club, the Bayern players are not so superstitious. https://twitter.com/CBSSportsGolazo/status/2044493658200719363

It's the story that has captivated America: a large screaming man roughly the color of a Fruit Roll-Up, who goes on AM radio every day to get upset about minorities, announced last week that he could no longer in good faith be a New York Mets fan. Dial down the volume and ambient bigotry and referring to himself in the third person, and long-tenured New York radio dingus Sid Rosenberg's decision to drop the Mets could seem reasonable. The team has lost eight straight, miserably, while playing a brand of baseball that suggests dangerously high levels of codeine in their Powerade. To consciously uncouple, temporarily or even permanently, with a team like this would be something like self-care. Not really sure why I'm going on about this part at such length. Ha ha. Anyway, Rosenberg did not do this in a considered way. He did it, as he mentioned in a series of posts and filmed video statements, because he thought the "Mamdani Mets" were woke. He was upset that Mr. and Mrs. Met had been "hugging and kissing" the city's Democratic Socialist mayor earlier this season, and by way of contrast and as an illustration of the organization's values, Rosenberg shared an image of himself "being IGNORED" by the team's mascots at a game last year.

In February of 2025, New York State correctional staff began an illegal work stoppage to challenge recent changes to the state’s carceral system. Their primary objective was to force the repeal of the Humane Alternatives to Longterm Solitary Confinement Act (also known as the HALT Act), a bill that is part of a larger initiative prioritizing the health of the imprisoned and our successful reentry into society. This bill mandates prisoners receive seven hours of congregate time outside our cells each day and otherwise limits “excessive” use of solitary confinement. In response to the strike, Governor Kathy Hochul suspended the HALT Act for 90 days and pursued a mediation, which ultimately ended with many officers returning to work and those who refused being fired—some 2,000 officers. The HALT Act’s policies should have been reinstated by May 21, 2025. However, it has been over 13 months since the work stoppage ended, and prisoners like myself are still living without access to recreation, programs, and the visits we are entitled to.  I currently reside at Elmira Correctional Facility, which in my experience did not adhere to most of the rules that benefited the imprisoned population even prior to the work stoppage. The administration has gone months at a time without operating most programs, including ones that must be completed before our release, even though we are entitled to consistent program access. Local visiting practices prevented spouses from sitting near their incarcerated partners, despite directives explicitly stating that our visitors should be permitted to rest their heads on our shoulders. Our mail, packages, and electronic mail content were almost never processed in a timely manner, and the systems in place to remedy these institutional failures have always been inherently flawed.  Since the work stoppage, things have gotten even worse. Recreation has been reduced to less than an hour per day. Most prisoners have not been afforded the opportunity to participate in any programs in over a year. Prisoners aren’t even permitted to walk to the cafeteria for lunch. Instead, our lunch—usually a bag with sandwiches—is brought to our cells every afternoon, denying us both the brief respite from the isolation of our cells and whatever warm food we would have been given for lunch that day. With less than an hour of recreation, no opportunity to program, and only two opportunities to go to the cafeteria, prisoners are forced to stay in our cells more than 22 hours each day. 

It was not so long ago that the return of baseball had me in my feelings in a positive way. Kelsey McKinney and I talked about it on the podcast just two weeks ago, but while the bump in my emotional wellbeing that accompanied the mere presence of baseball games on my television was real, it was not enduring. Which, beyond the fact that he is a delightful guest and has a new book coming out, is part of why we asked Michael Schur back onto the pod this week. We needed someone who knows how to get upset at a seasonally appropriate level. A great deal of this is on the Mets, who are in midseason form re: soft groundouts to second base but otherwise playing as if there were a gas leak in the dugout. As Drew noted, some portion of it is absolutely on me as well, but that's just how baseball is. Stuff phases in and out of significance over the course of a long season, players slump and surge, and generally the outcomes even out over time. Knowing all this is nice but does very little to make the bad stuff more bearable in the moment. From a podcasting perspective, it is better to get upset—as both Mike and I did about our respective sleepwalking teams of choice—than it is to maunder through some cope about regression to the mean. Although we did that, too.

As the Warriors bathed in the luminous joy of ending the Los Angeles Clippers' cursed season, Golden State head coach Steve Kerr offered five perfect words. "For one night," he grinned, "we're us." The 10th-seeded Warriors truly were their old selves, and not in the pejorative sense, turning around what had been a frustratingly out-of-reach play-in game against the ninth-seeded Clippers with some of the purest Warriorball anyone has seen all season, for a 126-121 win. I write the final score out there for emphasis, as the Warriors had been tracking to hit around 100 until the last 9:35 of the game, in which they scored 41 points. The Clippers held a 13-point lead at that 9:35 mark, and the Warriors did not seem to have the juice. They'd cobbled together some mildly functional offense, especially in the third quarter, as Steph Curry and Draymond Green piloted their two-man screen-and-dive hivemind over to interact with Kristaps Porzingis, though the effort it took them to get good shots was visibly taxing. All game, they would cut double-digit Clippers leads down to three or so, upon which they would get exhausted, LA would instantly start trying, and the lead would quickly balloon back up to double digits. Derrick Jones Jr. was mostly great defending Curry, especially one-on-one in space, Bennedict Mathurin was particularly good, and LA shot well from three on the night. Golden State, meanwhile, was playing an eight-man rotation that had scarcely played together all season. The Warriors had a really tough year, first finding themselves embroiled in a Jonathan Kuminga saga of their own making, then losing Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody to catastrophic knee injuries, then limping into the 10th seed as both Curry and Porzingis sustained injuries of their own. Watching the Warriors in March and April was a brutal experience, with Pat Spencer running the show, Charles Bassey anchoring the frontline, and Malevy Leons playing a big role. They had all the aesthetic bustedness of a tanking team, but not the incentives.

One cannot simply leave behind a life of crime. Your body craves the adrenaline for years afterward. It begs for it. The desire for just one more job, one more hit, one more simple robbery will never really go away, because a normal life is just so boring when compared with the thrill of disobedience. Who will stop you? Let them try. No one knows this better than the San Diego Padres, who after a long dormant winter without crimes have returned to their roguish ways and begun robbing again. On Wednesday night, they left some evidence of their misdeeds. It was the top of the third against the Seattle Mariners, and Julio Rodriguez stood in the batter's box with one ball against him. The victim spotted a beautiful meatball of a pitch: an 89-mph cutter that didn't cut at all and instead sat prettily in the middle of the strike zone. He swung quick and smooth, and the ball soared way, way out toward the deepest part of center field.

The New York Islanders took a moment during their final game of the season to promote a fundraiser for a former NYPD sergeant who was recently convicted of manslaughter. Yeah, sounds about right. During Tuesday's 2-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, the Islanders' jumbotron displayed a big QR code directing to a fundraiser put together with the Sergeants Benevolent Association, "in its fight for justice" for Erik Duran, a former cop sentenced to three to nine years for manslaughter for killing a suspect in 2023. There were no details provided by the team about what caused him to be convicted in the first place, because if those were made available, one might have concluded that he got off with a light sentence. In August of 2023, Duran was part of an undercover drug sting in the Bronx, intended to target 30-year-old Eric Duprey. When Duprey tried to flee on a motorized scooter, Duran picked up a bystander's cooler and threw it at Duprey, who crashed into a tree and was killed almost instantly. Duran was found guilty by a judge this past February and sentenced earlier this month.

The first thing you notice about the right side of the Stanley Cup playoff map is the almost complete absence of continuity—that is, if you're the sort of person who nerds out on that sort of thing, in which case you've got deeper personality flaws than we are equipped to tackle. But it does have that weird strangers-on-a-train feel that the NHL tends to brag about a bit more than it should. The two teams with the best-looking recent history are located in Tampa and Raleigh, which took you at least five years to get used to, but the rest of this year's field is very much the island of misfit toys. For starters, the four worst teams in the Eastern Conference last year are in the playoffs this time. There are no New York City–ish teams for the first since the Colorado Rockies moved to New Jersey 44 years ago. The two-time champion Panthers had everybody get hurt in unison and were out of contention by Valentine's Day. The never-not-smug Toronto Maple Leafs are in an abyss that the management thinks can be escaped through the use of ChatGPT instead of draft choices, and the Washington Ovechkinii are off this spring for only the third time in 18 years. There are Cup droughts to contend with, like Philadelphia (51 years), Montreal (33), Carolina (20), Boston (15), and, sure, what the hell, Pittsburgh (9). But if you want to boil the East down (an appealing idea), it's about two teams who not only have never won a Cup, but were considered roadside carcasses four short months ago: the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators.

For the second straight year, Harry and I have assembled a mega-sized playoff preview podcast. Just like last year, it features shortish interviews with people we like who follow as many of the teams in the playoffs and play-in as possible. Unlike last year, it was way too long to cram into one episode, let alone two. So this year, we bring you previews of the Western Conference, the Eastern Conference, and the Denver Nuggets. In the West, we brought on: Tyler Parker to talk Oklahoma City Thunder Eamon Whalen to talk Minnesota Timberwolves Billy Haisley's brother to talk Los Angeles Lakers Isaac Chotiner to talk Houston Rockets Sean Highkin to talk Portland Trail Blazers