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For the duration of my childhood, it felt like all of the romantic-comedy heroines were journalists. They worked at newspapers in Kissing Jessica Stein, Sleepless In Seattle, The Holiday, Never Been Kissed and When Harry Met Sally. If they didn't work at newspapers, they worked at glossy magazines like in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days and 13 Going On 30. In Hitch, she's a gossip columnist, but that counts. Or maybe she could work in publishing like in Bridget Jones's Diary. But they were writers in big cities, and they cared deeply and seriously about their jobs. The real plot of all of these movies, though, was the love line. Who would the protagonist fall in love with? Would it be that man (or woman) whom she hated initially? Usually, it would be. The Devil Wears Prada was different. Those other movies were all about falling in love with a romantic partner. The Devil Wears Prada is a movie about falling in love with work. Andy (Anne Hathaway) is a recent graduate from Northwestern who wants to be a serious journalist, but the only job she can find is one as assistant to the editor-in-chief of Runway. Unlike the other heroines, Andy starts the movie with a boyfriend, Nate, who lived with her but was otherwise pretty unsupportive of her career. He was supposed to function as a kind of moral compass for the film in 2006. The Andy he knew at Northwestern didn't care about Paris Fashion Week, what designer someone wore, or whether her hair was right. The Andy he knew cared about journalism, about reporting, about trying to change the world.

Patriots franchise quarterback Drake Maye told reporters yesterday that he isn't worried about head coach Mike Vrabel's relationship with former NFL insider Dianna Russini becoming a distraction for the team. He might want to rethink those comments. On Wednesday evening, TMZ reported that Vrabel and Russini booked a private boat trip in June 2021, while Vrabel was still head coach of the Tennessee Titans and while Russini would have been pregnant with her first child. According to TMZ's story, Russini and Vrabel were the only people on board during the two-to-three-hour trip, and were cautious about photos. This boat trip is just the latest piece of evidence indicating that Russini and Vrabel carried on a romantic relationship for many years. The publication of photos of them getting cozy at an adults-only resort in Sedona, Ariz. in 2026 led to more sources digging up photos of them smooching in a bar in 2020 and gambling at a casino in 2024. The irony of the situation is that each of these minor updates about the length and depth of their relationship are only made newsworthy by the fact that Russini and Vrabel lied about their relationship when the story first broke, and have since refused to talk about it at all. Vrabel attempted the frankly silly maneuver of announcing that he'll be going to therapy without saying exactly why, and Russini has been silent since resigning from her job at The Athletic. All that silence leaves behind questions that are being answered piecemeal by TMZ, Page Six, and the like.

Yes, it's early. There, we undercut your complaint before you even had a chance to assemble it. But it's not so early that we can't look at the American League standings and have a laugh at the sheer absurdity therein. Baseball is giving Rob Manfred a moment, in that the four good teams in baseball are the marquee-est of marquee teams—the Yankees, Braves, Dodgers, and Cubs. One on the East, one South, one Midwest, and one West. Couldn't have planned it better, Rob; you can use this to keep you warm when the lockout enters its eighth month. The American League having only one of those four teams if anything undersells how baffling the rest of that league has been. The Yankees are 25-12, with a run differential of +74—both admirable statistics if ultimately of minimal value given that we're still weeks from Memorial Day. The second-best team is Tampa Bay, at 24-12, and they also have the AL's second-best run differential, at an extremely modest +15. And those are all the teams in the American League with an actual winning record. Nearly a quarter of the season has gone by, now, which is enough time to at least make some assumptions. Let's start with this one: The American League stinks.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Billy answers a question about how a non-planner can adapt to the meticulously planned life of parenthood.

Heading into the most important four days of its season, Arsenal was spiraling. That's a relative term, because the Gunners were still in first place in the Premier League (via goal difference) and had escaped Madrid with a 1-1 draw against Atlético in the first leg of the Champions League semifinal. But! Manchester City was riding high domestically and had closed the points gap, looking great while doing so, and Atlético is a frisky opponent to get rid of, no matter the locale. Arsenal looked on the verge of collapsing, something that filled onlookers with dread or glee, depending on rooting interests. Simply put, these past four days had to go exactly Arsenal's way, or the growing panic would turn into blaring alarm bells. Good thing, then, that these past four days went almost as well for Arsenal as any Gooner could have hoped for. Starting with a confident, necessary, and dare I say entertaining 3-0 demolition of a very good Fulham team on Saturday, the three results Arsenal needed to go its way did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGnCdeEJuGs

On April 1, the best video art related to the 2025–26 NBA season was published. One month later, Harry and I had the creator of said art on Nothing But Respect. Danny of Who's Next is about a full decade younger than either of us, so we spent a lot of the episode talking through the different ways we consume sports, the media ecosystems we've spent time in, and what's been lost and gained in the phase shift to video over the last decade. We also talked about the playoffs themselves, with attention paid to the Donovan Mitchell windmill crossover, the Celtics' collapse, and why Joel Embiid deserves our love. This was a fun one! We got kids watching.

A sword, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is a "weapon ... with a long blade for cutting or thrusting that is often used as a symbol of honor or authority." A sword, as defined by Rob "Pitching Ninja" Friedman and quantified by Statcast, is "when a pitcher fools a hitter so badly that he forces a non-competitive swing, one where a batter either regrets his choice or can't stop himself from taking a hack that looks so ugly it ends up going viral on social media." By Statcast's standards, the swing Houston Astros second baseman José Altuve made against a Shohei Ohtani sweeper Tuesday night, on a 1-2 count with two outs in the fifth inning, would not qualify as a sword. It was simply too high-quality: a good swing with pace, that only happened to be at a ball far, far off the plate. But if Altuve felt any good about the swing at its beginning, he regretted it by the end, when a likely chorus of thoughts such as "No, no, no, no, NO" and "Ah, shit" had failed to stop him from following all the way through. The official title for this video on Baseball Savant simply reads, "Ohtani escapes a jam."

A Boston-area jury found former New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs not guilty Tuesday of all the criminal charges brought against him, after a former private chef working for the player told law enforcement he had tried to choke her following a fight about money she was owed. Diggs had been charged with one count of felony strangulation or suffocation and one count of misdemeanor assault and battery. The Boston Globe reported that the Dedham District Court jury reached its verdict after deliberating for under two hours following closing arguments earlier in the day. Local reporters in the courtroom signaled that a key moment in the two-day trial came during the chef's testimony. Boston 25 News, which broke the story of the criminal charges back in December, reported that Diggs's defense lawyer asked the chef Jamila Adams, "You know that someone on your behalf has demanded 5.5 million dollars from Stefon Diggs, don't you?" Adams replied that she had a workers' comp claim and was also exploring her civil options. The Associated Press reported that, when further pressed about the $5.5 million demand from her lawyer, Adams didn't answer the question directly, saying "I can't speak on that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGaI0CUdW0

LIV Golf is going ahead with this weekend's tournament at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C. This, despite the fact that the tour nobody has ever watched or cared about is getting unmoored from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which kept LIV afloat for all these years with ludicrous amounts of financing. The yokels left in charge of this ghost ship are putting on a brave face about the tour's future, but some of the players aren't so willing to express optimism. That shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone, given that their only reason for joining LIV Golf in the first place was access to the Saudi money hose. The tour made a few players from Legion XIII—pause here to chuckle and remember that one of LIV's big innovations was putting golfers on teams with stupid names—available to reporters on Tuesday. Team captain Jon Rahm, one of the more famous and well-compensated players who defected to LIV from the PGA, more or less admitted that he's only still playing because he is being held prisoner by his contract. From ESPN: "Right now, I have several years in my contract left," Rahm said. "I'm pretty sure they did a pretty good job when they drafted that, so I don't see many ways out. Right now, I'm not really thinking about it because we still have a season to play and majors to compete for. It's not something I want to think about just yet."

The National Hockey League made sure to schedule only one game for Tuesday night because their designated daily centerpiece was intended to be the draft lottery, which by most definitions of entertainment lands somewhere around high-tech old-folks-home bingo night. And what playoff hockey game could compare with the spectacle of ping pong balls get shoved through pneumatic tubes while Gary Bettman, looking like a faulty AI-generated version of Ken Jennings, blurts out nonsensical commands to some functionary or other? The idea is to inject drama into what is mostly a night that commemorates a season of disappointment for the league's losers before rewarding one with a bit of lousy luck. The result is just what it is. And then the Toronto Maple Leafs won the first pick as a reward for their embarrassing season, decisions, and people. This made the whole production almost worthwhile for the joy, annoyance, and anguished cries of "FIX! FRAUD! CHICANERY!" that followed. It was cheap and yet somehow fulfilling in that half-hour-I-can't-get-back kind of way; as a lottery show, it was at the very least miles better than the NBA version. So the scheduled game, already relegated to a bare simmer at the back of the stove, would have to be another doozy to steal back the stage. Minnesota at Colorado was the designated show pony, a much anticipated second-round battle between titans which had already produced a Cirque du Soleil of goals in the first game, a 9-6 Avs win. The playoffs have already been a festival of weirdness, so a 15-goal night was all in keeping with the general theme.