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Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon. This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucinatory deep-winter warmth endemic to that biome, and to microdose the L.A. experience of encountering celebrities in mundane contexts. But mostly I wanted to go to Erewhon. Erewhon is a chain of grocery stores with locations throughout the greater L.A. area. The chain gets its name (an anagram of "nowhere") from a satirical 1872 Samuel Butler novel about a "utopian" society that locks up the ill, forcing people to tend to their health and wellness under threat of imprisonment. Erewhon is known primarily for selling smoothies and a suite of ridiculous wellness products, all for outrageous amounts of money, though the items on offer at the store only go so far in explaining the broader Erewhon phenomenon and the chain's nimbus of mystical prestige. Most grocery stores, particularly in L.A., sell overpriced smoothies and serums, but only Erewhon attracts the paparazzi, carries itself like a luxury brand, and symbolizes something deeper about health and consumerism. So what distinguishes Erewhon?

It has been 2,500 days, give or take a week, since the San Jose Sharks last played a truly meaningful hockey game. That game was a series-ending 5-1 loss to St. Louis in the 2019 Western Conference final, and since then, the Sharks have been the worst team in the league both by record and, justifiably enough, by attendance. Whatever else you may think of Sharks fans, which we accept is essentially nothing one way or another, they are discerning. So the team has come up with a couple of shameless gimmicks to juice the house. The first was to invent an AI character named "Macklin Celebrini" to electrify and entertain on a nearly nightly basis, and when that seemed to hit a wall, they added a new twist to the Celebrini (which is the trendiest new aperitif order at your tonier bistros) by waiting until the last minute to score a game-winning goal. The Sharks trotted that move out in Columbus last Saturday, with a goal from Igor Chernyshov with 95 seconds left to beat the confounding Blue Jackets 3-2 in Ohio. But this innovation needed to be tested at home before their own customers to see if it would work there as well, and so the Sharks beat St. Louis 5-4 on Monday night thanks to an Adam Gaudette goal with 22 seconds to play. But that was before their first non-sellout crowd since early January, and so they tried it again last night against Anaheim with an added boost—they used a Celebrini goal with 1:39 left to tie the game (his 40th) and then an Alexander Wennberg goal with 31 seconds to play to win it, assisted of course by the Teal Refresher himself. This is the first time in NHL history that a team has won three consecutive games with a goal in the last two minutes of regulation, and serves as irrefutable testimony that the Sharks will try nearly any ridiculous idea to avoid wasting any more of the Celebrini they have in stock.

Levi McCathern, an attorney representing Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua, told The California Post on Wednesday that his client has checked into a rehab center in Malibu. Last month, Nacua was sued by a woman named Madison Atiabi, who says that Nacua bit her and made an antisemitic comment on New Year's Eve. According to Atiabi's suit, Nacua, who previously apologized for doing an antisemitic dance on camera, said, "Fuck all the Jews" while out to dinner in Los Angeles. The lawsuit also says that later in the night, while Atiabi was in a car with Nacua, he bit her on the left shoulder and left a "circular imprint of his teeth on her body." When news of Atiabi's lawsuit first broke, McCathern released a statement on behalf of Nacua denying the allegations "in the strongest possible terms." McCathern also claimed to be in possession of video evidence that would show "Atiabi's behavior and actions are inconsistent with the allegations being made." 

It was about 65 minutes after liftoff, the Integrity spacecraft 800 miles above the Indian Ocean and moving at about 16,000 miles per hour, when the historic words were spoken: "Integrity, Houston, toilet is powered."  It was a spaceflight milestone. Artemis II, which launched from Florida Wednesday evening, will put four humans around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions ceased in 1972. But the Orion crew vehicle, named Integrity, has something those Apollo astronauts lacked: an onboard toilet. As Orion spends its first day boosting itself to a high-Earth orbit in preparation for its lunar jaunt, it's already farther from the planet than any crewed spacecraft in 54 years. That means its toilet is the most distant toilet in the history of humankind.

In a move that perhaps stems from restlessness or jealousy over the federal government getting all the attention, the state of Florida has called for the NFL to get more racist. James Uthmeier, the state's attorney general, announced on March 25 that he would be sending a letter to the league to demand it get rid of "the so-called Rooney Rule," throwing into question his understanding of what "so-called" means. Dan Rooney definitely existed. "The NFL's use of the Rooney Rule violates Florida law by requiring race-based considerations in hiring," Uthmeier said in his video statement. "Florida law is clear: Hiring decisions cannot be based on race, and the Rooney Rule mandates race-based interviews and incentivizes race-based decisions." This is part of a larger campaign waged by Uthmeier since he was appointed in 2025. With the blessing of Governor Ron DeSantis, the AG has used his position to go after companies with diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Uthmeier has filed lawsuits against Starbucks and Target, the latter over a 2023 Pride marketing campaign that he claimed was defrauding the company's investors. Disregard that Uthmeier himself had a key role in the Hope Florida scandal, in which $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement was allegedly funneled into a political committee that he oversaw before the 2024 election. Also disregard that Uthmeier is running for a full four-year term this November.

There are many ways to frame what I'm about to say, and I'm sure someone funnier and smarter than me could find the perfect way to really maximize the impact of this sentence. I, however, think the bold-faced truth, with no embellishment, is the funniest way to deliver this news, and so: For the third straight time, the Italian national team has failed to qualify to the World Cup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEKZd_BfUjU Thanks to two losses to Norway in UEFA qualifier group play, Italy botched its initial qualification process for the 2026 World Cup, capped in embarrassing 4-1 blowout fashion back in November, at home no less. That meant the Italians had to navigate two one-leg knockout matches to keep the hopes of a return to the World Cup alive. The Azzurri did dispatch Northern Ireland 2-0 in Bergamo on Mar. 26, while Bosnia and Herzegovina beat Wales in a penalty shootout on the same day. That set up Tuesday's win-and-you're-in showdown in Zenica, in front of a rowdy Bosnia crowd that was no less fervent in the face of a capacity reduction handed down by FIFA, due to previous incidents in a match against Romania last year.

When Defector decided to get in on the market for parenting advice, there were many questions we had to consider. After all, there is no shortage of content on parenting at the moment: Oscar-winning movies about the prolonged effects of marijuana usage and guerrilla warfare on fatherhood. Oscar-winning movies on the tragedy of Elizabethan-era motherhood…

The WNBA is still a fairly new league in both geologic and relative terms, and so the news that the Connecticut Sun had been sold to the folks who own the Houston Rockets and would move to Texas after this season created minimal stir, despite some ambient stink on the deal. WNBA franchises have moved before; the one that played in Houston won the league's first four championships, fielded some of the early WNBA's biggest stars, and was one of the sport's most iconic organizations before it disbanded. That was in 2008, although it feels much longer ago. Today, the league's franchises, established and expansion, are being bought up by NBA owners, and Tilman Fertitta, who owns the Rockets and is the United States' ambassador to Italy and San Marino, evidently needs something else to do. There was little fuss or muss, and, despite some high-powered threats, no lawsuits about the sale, and no demands for the team's history to remain in Connecticut. The franchise belonged to the Mohegan Tribe, and they could, and did, sell to whatever party they preferred. Nobody made much of a stink about the records when the Orlando Miracle moved to Connecticut to become the Sun, either. It was just another instance of this strange business conducting business as usual.  But it's a funny thing about sports history—for all the hard numbers underpinning it, it is generally much more contingent on negotiations and dealmaking than it is on facts. The Seattle Soon-To-Be-Super-Again-Sonics organization will rise from the crypt in the next round of NBA expansion, and will both replace and supplant the Sonics that were skirted off to Oklahoma City. The citizens of Seattle demanded the name, team colors, and records in exchange for not suing owner Clay Bennett six generations into the future back then, and Bennett didn't care about any of that extraneous paperwork. And so the Thunder were for all intents and purposes an expansion team when they relocated to OKC, unless you knew the context. This despite having the same front office, coaches, players, and staff by whom and with which that history was made. Kevin Durant began his career with the Sonics in '07-08 and continued it with the Thunder the next season. It wasn't a trade that moved him from one team to the other, but it was a deal.

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now. Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

C.B. Bucknor has got to be the only person on Earth wishing that Angel Hernandez was still an active major league umpire. Ever since Hernandez abruptly retired in 2024, the search for baseball's new bad-call bogeyman has been on. It seems that the spotlight is settling on Bucknor, who has long matched Hernandez in inaccuracy if not infamy. Over the weekend, Bucknor became the sullen face of the ABS era when baseball fans discovered how much fun it is to watch an umpire get humiliated in front of a packed stadium over and over again. Bucknor had six of his strike calls overturned while behind the plate during Saturday's Red Sox–Reds game, including two would-be third strikes on back-to-back challenges. Bucknor was the first-base umpire in Tuesday night's game between the Brewers and Rays, and managed to step in it even without ABS looking over his shoulder. In the sixth inning, Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers hit an infield single. There was a bit of confusion following the play, because Bucknor had called Bauers out despite the throw to first sailing far wide of Rays first baseman Jonathan Aranda's glove. As Bauers was walking back to first base, Aranda decided to tag him just in case he had initially missed the bag, at which point Bucknor decided that, yes, Bauers had failed to touch first and was therefore out. The only problem was that Bauers had clearly touched first. I don't mean that he grazed the corner of the bag while running at a sprint; he put his whole foot in the middle of the damn base. It is not possible to touch first more solidly or obviously than this: