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Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season games something of a relief. It also makes it possible for us to get a little more creative with booking this podcast. When the baseball season is starting and the college basketball season is roaring towards its end, it's only natural that we would try to talk about it. When that isn't happening, it makes it a lot easier to have our buddy Ed Zitron back on to talk about the state of the AI bubble and tech psychosis more broadly. So we did. And after a few stray thoughts on l'affaire Russini-Vrabel and the subsequent masterclass in crisis management, we got right to it. Ed got us caught up on how AI technology is being put to use in the disastrous Iran engagement, and how those tools differ from the janky public-facing offerings currently being put to work writing some of the wackest high-school essays ever submitted. We also discussed how difficult it is to tell which AI tools are better than others, and why Grok is nevertheless instantly identifiable as the unchallenged worst in the field. We considered the hell dimension of Grok users who complain about Grok on Reddit, delivered a cursory RIP for OpenAI's baffling Sora video technology, which Drew aptly dubbed "the Quibi of AI," and dove into the spectacularly upside-down business model of the big AI companies. Finally, we pondered the question of why OpenAI is trying to go public, given what the sort of paperwork involved in an IPO would reveal, and considered whether it's possible for a money-losing business to skip straight to meme-stock status. You probably won't be surprised to learn that Ed is not optimistic on that one.

When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a "Land of Many Uses." This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service's management of the forestland covering over a third of the United States. Since its inception over a century ago, the agency has both overseen conservation efforts and managed resource extraction by private concerns, mostly timber companies. The USFS has proved a mostly capable steward, resisting private capital's siren song of destruction and subjugation. The most important few of the aforementioned many uses are recreation, science, and simple existence. The best thing you can do for a forest is observe it and keep it from incinerating. All that careful balance is gone. The forest as we know it is the latest target of war from the Trump administration. Early last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a series of moves that amount to the dismantling of the USFS. The first and most important change is that the headquarters of the agency will relocate by some 2,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, which not coincidentally is the nerve center of the anti–public lands movement in the U.S. Several of the most powerful figures in the war on public lands, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, and Gov. Spencer Cox, have based their efforts there; the 1980 Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement led by ranchers and oilmen to transfer control of Western public lands to state governments more amenable to their privatization and exploitation, began in the city. This mirrors Trump's first-term strategy with the Bureau of Land Management, which he turned over to extractivist crusader William Perry Pendley and briefly relocated alongside a Chevron corporate office in Colorado.

Complaints that men’s tennis is too fast go back further than I do. “Aces, Aces…men’s tennis too fast for its own good,” reads the headline to a 1992 Associated Press story that, to help make its point, begins with a quote from Casablanca. “Well, you just have to guess where the ball is going to go and pray,” Carlos Moya said in 1998 after a befuddling U.S. Open semifinal loss to Mark Philippoussis and his huge serve. “Because even if you know where the ball is going, it’s not easy to put it back.” A 1994 AP story in the Salina Journal cited Dutch fans chanting “boring” as Pete Sampras served aces against their Richard Krajicek at the Davis Cup. (It worked; Krajicek won.) The Daily Mirror once nicknamed Sampras “Samprazzz,” since his matches at Wimbledon, even finals, tended to be so straightforwardly serve-centric. One article advocated for a return to wooden rackets. The Philadelphia News headline in advance of the 1994 Wimbledon final: “Sampras, Ivanisevic advance to (yawn) Wimbledon final.” The Star, postmatch: “Sampras sees off Ivanisevic in boring game,” under the much larger heading, “BIG SLEEP.” This piece came on a page whose left side was plastered with a variety of sex ads, numbers for anyone from “BORED WIFE” to “IN THE SHOWER” to “Susi & Mary” to—yikes—“18 Year Old Students.” Perhaps someone thought it appropriate to spice up an otherwise snoozy page. Today, the movies are worse and the newspapers are endangered, but the tennis gripe should be the same. To read how Jim Courier described playing and losing to Sampras in the 1993 Wimbledon final—“If he starts hitting his second serve around 95 to 100 miles per hour, putting it in the corners, it's pretty unstoppable”—is to realize how most current ATP players worth their salt do the same thing. Players can hit forehands faster than some first serves. The current meta is power; the mindset is relentless aggression. Merely returning a serve won’t get you into a point if the return isn’t hard to attack, too.  Tall task! The best first serves these days paint the lines at high speeds, with motions that effectively disguise which corner the server is aiming at. On top of all that, the ATP is populated with returners who range from mediocre to miserable (Lorenzo Musetti, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton, go down the list). At the Miami Open, finalists Jannik Sinner and Jiri Lehecka had their serves broken a combined three times all tournament. (Sinner scored two of those breaks in the final.) The Indian Wells final between Sinner and Daniil Medvedev saw zero breaks of serve and only two break points. Carlos Alcaraz won the 2025 U.S. Open, seven matches, after being broken just three times (and once in his first five matches combined). Even in his most dominant Wimbledon runs, Sampras was never broken fewer than seven times. The tennis writer Matthew Willis has observed that on hard courts, Casper Ruud—whose serve is probably a candidate for the least-discussed shot on tour, somewhere up there with Andrey Rublev’s backhand or your brother’s forehand volley—is holding serve on hard courts lately at a higher rate than Sampras did in 1994. Willis also posted a graph of top-50 ATP players’ service hold rate, dating back to 1992; they’re now holding more often than at any other point in that span. 

The San Francisco Giants shut out the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-0, Wednesday night, for their second consecutive shutout victory and first home series win of the season. The Giants are 5-8 and presently in last place in what is shaping up to be a tough NL West—yes, behind even the Colorado Rockies, who are having a ball. They've faced a tough schedule, but wins and losses are only part of the picture: The Giants sport the worst run differential (-16) and second-worst offense by total runs (41) in the National League. They scored a single run in their season-opening three-game series against the Yankees, and were outscored 24–5 in three losses to the Mets. They've looked listless at times, and broadly out of sorts. By at least one measure, this has been the worst start to a Giants season in more than a century. It has not been an encouraging introduction to the majors for rookie manager Tony Vitello. Vitello has been on the job not quite six months, and already his legend is growing, though not in any direction he might've hoped. He didn't say anything weird or outlandish at Wednesday's postgame presser, which was a surprise. So far this season he has already given props to a disgraced, radioactive entertainer and affectionately compared his player to an athlete currently in the news for flipping his SUV. He's also revealed more than is advisable about his team's internal dynamics and his own managerial thought processes. "It’d be awesome to be in a better situation, but I think we found some things out about ourselves that can be valuable in the long run," Vitello said on Wednesday. "We’ve certainly got to be motivated to learn from mistakes in the past and hunt down the best version of ourselves." Perhaps when he says "learn from mistakes" and "hunt down the best version of ourselves," Vitello is referencing more than swing decisions. Perhaps he is prepared to be normal for a change.

By now, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold has established her beat as doggedly reporting on her own humiliation. This is someone who excels not just at taking an L, but at putting all of her Ls in a big pile and showing them off to whoever happens to be nearby. Reingold's latest embarrassment came at a rally in Michigan for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has drawn the ire of pro-Israel media outlets like the Free Press due to his criticism of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Reingold attended the event, sent some tweets that tried and failed to mock attendees ("One girl hasn’t blinked in 20 seconds"—what?), then asked El-Sayed questions during a press scrum. One of those questions was about Israel's right to exist as a "Jewish state." Here's how Reingold described the interaction in her article: Later that night, in a makeshift spin room assembled by the campaign, he rebuffed my question on whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. “What do you mean by ‘Jewish state?’” he retorted, narrowing his eyes. “If you can’t answer that question, I’m not going to answer it.”

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. We are a quarter of the way through 2026. Time is just flying by while we all wait to see if global catastrophe will befall us. Fun stuff. Obviously, what we all really need is a soundtrack. What can be said about the year in music after just three months? There's a lot of anxiety, but also a clear desire to free oneself from said anxiety. There seems to be conscious attempt by many to make "end times" music, which sometimes means dwelling in the abyss of the soul, and other times means partying till the party's over, oops, out of time. The human experience contains multitudes.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome David Roth back to the show. Roth knows more about men's college basketball than either Harry or I, but more importantly, he has equally strong opinions about draft prospects. I mean that in both the specific and general senses. We all have guys we like, as well as various archetypes that remain permanently tantalizing. Lots of good Yaxel Lendeborg chat, so tap in.

If you could dig up my Google Maps history from fall 2022, you would find that I had repeatedly searched for how to get from Columbia University to the American Dream mall by public transportation. Located in East Rutherford, N.J., American Dream is the second-largest mall in the country, right behind the Mall of America. There’s an indoor ski slope, roller coasters, an aquarium, a water park, and even a virtual-reality cliff jumping attraction, whatever that means. But it wasn’t any of those things that made me consider the journey out to New Jersey. Instead, I was much more interested in visiting the indoor, NHL-sized ice rink located in the middle of the mall. In September 2022, the Metropolitan Riveters of the Premier Hockey Federation, a professional women’s hockey league, announced that their home ice for the season was going to be the rink at the American Dream. They’d allegedly be able to have up to 2,000 spectators—with the caveat that there were no built-in seats at the mall’s rink, so the stands would need to be set up before every game. Controversially, then-Riveters president Digit Murphy made a comment about how players could promote the game by doing fashion shows on the ice. I wanted to see a professional women’s hockey game in person, and to root for the Riveters, but I also couldn’t get over the indignity of these top-tier women’s players calling a megamall’s rink their home base. It was as if they were one of the many novel spectacles at American Dream, somewhere between the Nickelodeon theme park and the Angry Birds mini golf. As one Seattle Torrent fan, Katrina L., told me this past weekend, it felt like the last few professional women’s hockey leagues had been “really elaborate Ponzi schemes.”

The final week of the NBA's regular season is here, and with scant meaningful basketball on the horizon, it's time to debate various NBA awards. Will Victor Wembanyama's narrative momentum help him overtake the obviously correct MVP choice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? Will Karl-Anthony Towns sneak onto the All-NBA third team? Will Sacramento's Maxime Raynaud or Utah's Ace Bailey earn the final All-Rookie first-team slot? All valid questions, but discussion around any award must necessarily reckon with the strange boundary circumscribing the parameters of every end-of-season award, except for the rookie ones: the 65-game rule. As part of the 2023 collective bargaining agreement, the NBA and the players association agreed that in order to be eligible for any end-of-season award (except the rookie ones), a player would have to have played at least 20 minutes in 65 games. The precise language affords some wiggle room—players who hit 62 games and then suffer a season-ending injury can be eligible, and there is a grievance process in place for players who experience "extraordinary circumstances"—though not enough to prevent several star players who had great seasons from missing out on their deserved rewards, or having to hustle back from serious injuries to play in meaningless games in order to scrape onto the ballot. Cade Cunningham suffered a collapsed lung five minutes into his 61st game of the year with the Pistons, and he will have to play all of Detroit's final five games to be eligible for All-NBA honors which he has more than earned. Anthony Edwards hurt his knee and will not get to 65. Luka Doncic is on 64 and out for the remainder of the regular season, and will file a grievance. Detroit's Isaiah Stewart, who should be All-Defense, won't get to 65; his teammate Ausar Thompson, who should join him in that honor, has played 70 games but has gotten to 20 minutes in only 61 of them. Wembanyama hurt his rib against the Philadelphia 76ers and is one game short.

In the midst of yet another apocalyptic news cycle, nothing lifts my spirits more than a good old-fashioned sex scandal. And what’s this? It appears that Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, who once told the world he’d cut off his own penis to win a Super Bowl, has decided to make good use of that penis while it’s still attached to his body. Tuesday night, Page Six ran a series of photos showing Vrabel getting up close and personal with The Athletic's NFL insider Dianna Russini at an adults-only, honeymooner resort in Sedona, Ariz. Both Vrabel and Russini are married, just not to each other. They also each have two kids … again, not with one another. Oh shit. While the Post didn’t get hard evidence of these two in flagrante delicto, they did score multiple photos of Vrabel and Russini holding hands, hugging, soaking in the hot tub, and just generally doing shit that people who are fucking each other tend to do. The Post also had sources at the resort offer a few more irresistible details: Both Russini and Vrabel insist they were there with friends and say they simply weren’t visible in the pictures. A source close to Russini says she was staying at the hotel during a hiking trip with two female pals. One of Vrabel’s friends told Page Six that they and the coach drove up to Sedona for the day with another pal and that they all drove back to their own hotel, some two hours away, after hanging out with Russini and her gang.