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One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued throughout her time with the league, the most lucrative professional sports league in North America. The discrimination included not having proper cold-weather gear for winter games, requests for how she wore her hair, and being told to The complaint, filed in a Manhattan court, lists 12 claims under federal and state laws, all a form of either gender discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. It names the NFL as well as two of DeLorenzo's former supervisors as defendants, former NFL officiating chief Walt Anderson and former NFL official Byron Boston, who also supervised her. HRM America first reported reported about the complaint. In a statement to Football Zebras, the NFL said DeLorenzo was fired "following three seasons of documented underperformance" and the allegations in the lawsuit were "baseless." DeLorenzo's lawsuit asserts otherwise. "[DeLorenzo]'s career was not derailed by lack of ability, effort, or dedication," the complaint said. "It was destroyed because she is a woman in an institution that, despite its slogans, is structurally unwilling to treat women as equals."

It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of a waste. This week, with Drew out of town, and the long and contentious libel charges I brought against her and Megan due to their fish-related calumnies in that episode resolved in my favor by a court of law, we remedied that. The result was an episode that touches upon picking up hobbies as an adult, the hazards of the MLB partial season-ticket package, and how to be good at going to restaurants while pointedly not accusing me of any food-safety improprieties. We'll have some more formal MLB preview stuff on the podcast in the weeks to come, but feel free to consider this week's highly informal discussion an overture to all that. We discussed the usefulness of baseball as a place to put your stress and mental illness, offered an adult perspective on eating nine hot dogs in one day, and celebrated the eephus of Phillies utility man Dylan Moore. Whom I confused with Tyler Moore. I'm not apologizing for that, and will never, I'm just getting it on the record. Kelsey talked about "The Bad Grannies" and the other members of her Phillies ticket-package family, we compared our early-season live baseball experiences, and shared our early impressions of baseball's grand ABS experiment. Kelsey also spoke on Baseball Sainthood, a Kelsey Original Concept developed in collaboration with the Elias Sports Bureau; we celebrated a newly canonized Baseball Saint, bemoaned the decline of annoying-style baseball offense, and talked a bit about the Elias Sports Bureau, which was a towering mythic part of my young fandom and is now a place that Kelsey sends weird emails.

For a population that increasingly spends their time and makes their money in the Arab world, tennis players have had almost nothing to say about Palestine. In that respect, they are like most professional athletes in 2026: silent on even the most obvious injustices, possibly out of ignorance or (more likely) a reluctance to endanger any commercial opportunities. When asked about any subject that could have a political dimension, they tend to clam up or dive into the safest of cliches, as our Owen Lewis discovered firsthand at the Australian Open. At least for the American contingent, there's Coco Gauff, one of the few players who readily acknowledges the existence of a world outside the tennis tournament, and can critically reflect on that world. "For me, it's sometimes troubling to live the life I live, in knowing that so many kids and innocent people are dying on both ends, but especially in what's going on in Gaza and the occupation that’s happening," Gauff said in 2024. Elsewhere, Turkish player Zeynep Sonmez has competed while wearing a watermelon pin. In a 2023 interview with Clay, Egyptian player Mayar Sherif asked good questions about why the WTA threw its support behind Ukraine in its war with Russia, but remained silent on Gaza. Beyond a few isolated cases, commentary on or open support for Palestine is scarce at the highest levels of the sport. In this environment, Tunisian player Ons Jabeur is conspicuous. Jabeur, the former world No. 2, is an eminent stylist on court, and by some margin the greatest Arab or African tennis player in history. To hear her tell it, Palestine has never been far from her thoughts over the last three years. She pledged some of her prize money to Palestine aid during an on-court speech at the 2023 WTA Finals, and has been raising funds for Gaza as an ambassador for the World Food Programme since 2024.

The San Antonio Spurs won again Wednesday night, dumping the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco to move a whopping 40 games over .500. The win was their 10th in a row and 15th in 16; they are presently mounting their second 10-game winning streak since the end of January. In each of their last two wins, Victor Wembanyama has posted 40-point double-doubles, making him the first Spur in history to accomplish the feat. That's pretty remarkable, considering the lineage, but like many benchmarks of this sort, it is also somewhat arbitrary, and can be adjusted for era, if you're the sort. For the purposes of this blog, it is a pretext for showing you some Wembanyama highlights. Our huge French noodle lad is doing remarkable things out there. In the first of these consecutive huge performances, Wembanyama exploited a Chicago Bulls roster that could put no one larger or more serious before him than Guerschon Yabusele. Yabusele is broadly fine, as a rotation guy, but at 6-foot-7 he is a terrible matchup for a guy who can dunk without leaping. Whether because he knew his opponents would be too small, or because he knows that they have been eliminated from the playoffs and thus have lost any incentive to compete for wins, or because he is simply bored of doing normal basketball stuff, Wembanyama used the Bulls game to expand his comfort zone, attempting a career-high 27 shots. "Just figuring out some stuff," Wembanyama said, after taking a surprisingly long pause following a post-game query. "Felt like I needed my offense to get back to a certain level." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBtfoWextcI

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 Finals, 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 Monday night the Sharks beat St. Louis, 5-4, 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.