Grand Theft Auto VI is now set to release on May 26, 2026. https://t.co/YgaIn1cYc8 pic.twitter.com/cyeK7GM6Ob
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) May 2, 2025
New Yorker - "The Sporting Scene
If the Mets Are No Longer Underdogs, Are They Still the Mets?"
"There is no local ordinance that says New York has to be a Yankees town, and in fact it wasn’t always: for the first few decades of big-league baseball, the city’s allegiance lay mostly with the Giants, who were perennial contenders at the start of the twentieth century. The Yankees were the junior team until a brewer’s son, Jacob Ruppert, bought them, in 1915, and they became flush with cash. Then they pilfered a slugger in his mid-twenties from a rival club: Babe Ruth, who’d begun his career with the Boston Red Sox. Ruppert and his co-owner built Yankee Stadium a few years later. It was much larger than other ballparks and, some said, had the sterile feeling of a bank. The Yankees seemed “to be thoroughly imbued with the New York idea that money can buy anything,” a columnist wrote in The Sporting News. And maybe it could, because during the next hundred years the Yankees won twenty-seven championships.
They’d just won their nineteenth when the Mets arrived, on a wave of nostalgia. The Giants had left the city for San Francisco five years earlier. Only one person voted against the move: the stockbroker for Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson, who owned a small share in the team and loved Willie Mays. (She was also fond of horse racing and the Impressionists.) When a lawyer named William Shea put together a plan to form a new league to compete with Major League Baseball, he tapped her to own its New York team. She could afford it—she was a Whitney, after all, as in the museum. To head off Shea’s plan, the American League and the National League each agreed to add two new teams, including a National League team in New York City which would be principally owned by Payson. She understood the assignment. The Mets weren’t going to win a World Series right away. They needed to draw former fans of the Giants and of the other team that had left for California, the Brooklyn Dodgers. And they needed to entertain them.
Nothing about the Mets, except possibly their name, the Metropolitans, was particularly subtle. (Payson, for her part, had preferred Meadowlarks.) The team’s insignia was the same orange intertwined “NY” that had been used by the Giants, and the blue was borrowed from the Dodgers. The first roster featured once great players who were recognizable to the spurned fan bases, even if the quality of their play no longer was. To manage the team, Payson called on Casey Stengel, a gifted coach who was an even more gifted gabber. He’d recently been fired from the Yankees for the sin of aging. “I’ll never make the mistake of being seventy again,” he said."
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) May 8, 2025
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) May 9, 2025
WSJ - "Gregg Popovich: The Old-School Coach Who Saw the Future of the NBA"
"By the time the Spurs won their final championship under Popovich, knocking off James’s Miami Heat in 2014, they had become one of the highest-scoring teams in the league. Flags from every corner of the globe—Argentina, Brazil, Italy, New Zealand—were draped around the players’ necks on the podium.
Historically, the NBA’s greatest teams have tended to belong to America’s major cities: the ’60s Celtics, the ’70s Knicks, the ’80s Lakers, the ’90s Bulls. Popovich has tended to downplay his role in bringing an unlikely basketball dynasty to San Antonio. In 2021, Popovich offered his keys to success in the cutthroat world of professional basketball.
“Draft Tim Duncan,” Popovich said. “After that, stay alive.”"
Malia Obama directed the latest ad for A’ja Wilson’s signature shoe, the Nike A’One 🔥💖 @_ajawilson22 https://t.co/i5QzLrPFWQ pic.twitter.com/40ovXmn0rC
— Nice Kicks (@nicekicks) May 4, 2025
New Yorker - "The Dire Wolf Is Back"
By D.T. Max
"I asked Lamm when a university lab would have completed a comparable effort.
“Never,” he replied.
On March 25th, I went to meet the two older pups, named Romulus and Remus. (The third pup, named Khaleesi—for the light-haired protagonist of “Game of Thrones”—was not yet ready for visitors, I was told.) I was given directions to a one-acre enclosure at a location in the northern U.S. The dire wolves normally live on a two-thousand-acre property far from the spot where I was headed. “They live like kings there,” Lamm told me. As I drove up to the enclosure, I saw Church, looking like Gandalf, with a bushy white beard, and Lamm, who, with his luxuriant, glossy facial hair, resembles Jon Snow, Ghost’s master. Matt James was present, and a phalanx of animal-care officers stood in a corner, in case there were problems.
I suddenly saw two shocks of white—the young dire wolves. Both attentive and wary, the animals seemed not from this world. They were impressively large: roughly eighty pounds apiece, at five months old. Lamm told me that they would likely weigh about a hundred and forty pounds at maturity—at least twenty pounds more than a large adult male gray wolf."
WSJ - "Man Versus Machine as China Shows Off Humanoid Robots in Half-Marathon"
"The human male champion completed the race in one hour, two minutes and 36 seconds, followed by thousands of exhilarated human runners. Some were exhausted, resting nearby to catch their breath.
After two hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds, Tien Kung Ultra was the first robot to reach the finish line. A large crowd of spectators, including government officials, was eagerly awaiting the robots. Many surrounded Tien Kung Ultra to take photos. The robot maintained its blank expression.
In the end, only Tien Kung Ultra and Little Rascal N2 were able to meet the original cutoff time, and the organizers extended it to 4 hours and 10 minutes so that more robots could finish the race. Little Rascal’s sibling model Xuanfeng Xiaozi N2—or Whirlwind Kid—was among the robots that followed, state media showed. While team Tien Kung stuck with one robot throughout the race, others switched.
Hang Qian, a 29-year-old Beijing resident who ran the half-marathon, said he beat Tien Kung Ultra by about 10 minutes.
“For ordinary people, a half marathon is an extremely challenging sport and everyone gets exhausted. But robots can continue on by replacing the battery,” Hang said"
New Yorker - "What Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I."
"In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”
“The Andromeda Strain” had a strong premise, but Gottlieb, who would later become the editor of The New Yorker, thought it needed work. As he recalled in a joint 1994 interview, he told Crichton that if the young author agreed to “completely rewrite it” he would publish the book. “Somehow, it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh out the characters further and make the novel more conventional,” Gottlieb said, “we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, a fictional one.” He suggested that Crichton treat the book like a magazine article, reporting on the events as if they actually happened instead of developing each character’s subjective world. “The author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way you assume for fiction,” Crichton said. “So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal.”
The changes worked. The Detroit Free Press said that the thriller featured “hideously plausible suspense,” and Life called it “chillingly effective.” The book hit the New York Times best-seller list and caught the attention of Universal Pictures, which paid Crichton a quarter-million dollars (more than two million in today’s dollars) for the movie rights. Crichton ended his medical training early and became a writer and director in California. Gottlieb’s advice, which helped launch Crichton’s career, remains surprisingly relevant today. The story of a new technology needs no hero or villain to drive the action forward; the technology itself often becomes the protagonist, and we all live with the consequences."
Seattle Eater - "The Original Burgermaster, a Chunk of Seattle History, Is Closing After 73 Years"
"Burgermaster may not have the cultural cachet of Canlis or Dick’s, and the six-restaurant chain is pretty much unknown outside the Seattle area. But its original location embodies a kind of small-city grittiness that has faded as Seattle has become wealthier and more cosmopolitan. That restaurant started as a drive-in but changed to a dine-in model in the 1970s. And unlike the other Burgermasters, the location serves breakfast, making it more like a diner than a fast-food joint. (A Burgermaster spokesperson said that the other locations were drive-in only, but the chain hoped to offer breakfast options soon.)"
New Yorker - "Tom Brady, Armchair Quarterback"
"This persona is apparent in the career of one of Brady’s chief on-field rivals, Peyton Manning. Manning is from good Southern football stock—his father, Archie, was a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, his brother Eli was the scrappy, courageous leader of the New York Giants, and his nephew Arch will soon be drafted into the N.F.L.—but his excellence seemed well earned. His game was full of minute adjustments and quick decisions; he was famous for how encyclopedically he could master any playbook you threw at him. Nowadays, he owns a production company whose main product is “Manningcast,” an ESPN2 show that Peyton hosts with Eli. As they watch football games and chat, Peyton comes across as a great hang, an enlightened good old boy. He doesn’t seem driven by demons or a need to dominate anyone. It’s easy to understand why his teammates all seemed to like him so much.
Brady, though, has a fishier personality and a cooler eye. His closest likeness isn’t to other quarterbacks but to the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who, five years ago, died in a helicopter crash at a woefully early age. Like Bryant—who turned his gym-rat nature into a tall-tale mythos like that of Paul Bunyan—Brady likes to talk about his work ethic, about how desperately he needs to win and how far he’s willing to go to fill the void. Brady, in his own telling, holds on to small slights and inflates them just enough to fuel himself to victory. “I was always kind of motivated by people that say, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” he once told his fellow ex-player Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” All he needs is a snippet of smack talk, the hint of an insult, or even a cross look to make him mad enough to reach the end zone. If the classic quarterback, embodied by Manning, accomplished his exploits through the force of good will, Brady—a progenitor and a product of today’s so-called hustle culture—needs grist for irritation to reach his true heights."
New York Times - "How Vuori Became One of the Hottest Names in Fashion"
"After his career as a model ended, Mr. Kudla returned to San Diego to work as a senior auditor for Ernst & Young. His first entrepreneurial pursuit was helping his girlfriend at the time with a short-lived contemporary women’s clothing line. He then founded Vuori as a graphic T-shirt line, named after the Finnish word for mountain. The brand, however, failed to attract interest from retailers or consumers.
A chance encounter with an executive business coach and intuitive, or psychic medium, shifted Mr. Kudla’s trajectory.
“She told me that the business that I was working on is going to be wildly successful, but it wasn’t going to be in its current form or with my current partner,” he said. “And that was very hard for me to hear. She told me all these things about my family, and it got my head spinning — it was very emotional for me.”
The very next day, Mr. Kudla began a process of what he called “personal development and growth as a human being,” committing himself to a yoga and meditation practice. The idea of Vuori as it is today crystallized during this time.
“You didn’t have this overall ‘active lifestyle’ positioning,” Mr. Kudla said, “where it was a fashion-meets-function product that could work in a yoga class, but you’d feel comfortable wearing it to a dinner afterward or hanging out with friends — and that was very much the lifestyle I was living.”
Most sports apparel at the time was designed for a specific activity — running, say, or basketball — and often came with flashy design flourishes, Mr. Kudla recalled, like racing stripes, logos or reflective accents. Instead, he wanted to create something that had a subtler, everyday aesthetic but retained those activewear properties. He knew there was a market because he noticed that men in San Diego, instead of wearing athletic shorts to yoga class, often opted for more understated board shorts."
