Days of humidity had finally broken with a thunderstorm the night before. Brazilians were all over midtown, getting ready for their World Cup game. Puerto Rican and Pride flags were everywhere. "Knicks in five" was no longer a shibboleth or even a prediction; it was now the city's standard greeting. It was a glorious Saturday to be out in New York.

The watch parties had started organically.…

The Defector basketball chat was captivated by a sequence of artfully stage-lit photos in Game 1 of the Knicks-Sixers playoff series at Madison Square Garden. They were the work of Nathaniel S. Butler, senior official photographer for the NBA. Butler has shot the league from up close for over 40 years, from the era of cigarette smoke to the era of outthrust smartphones, and he compiled some of…

I suppose that if I were to complain about how NASA is making available the bulk of the photography captured by Artemis astronauts, NASA would tell me to go to the Moon and get my own pics, if I think I could do it better. But the fact remains that they're just _dumping_ these things: 12,217 new images released this weekend, "available" on a website that barely works, and not sorted, or…

In the 10 days since Artemis II splashed down safely, NASA has continued to release new imagery from the mission. A personal favorite is the one atop this post, taken from a camera mounted on one of the Orion capsule's solar array wings. It captures Orion, the Moon, and the Earth, helping to add some framing to a perspective that humans were never meant to quite wrap their brains around.

The…

Artemis II is headed for the Moon; it quite literally cannot _not_ go to the Moon, now. After a trans-lunar injection burn Thursday evening, there physically is not enough fuel on the spacecraft to do anything but relatively small course corrections. It's on a free-return trajectory, which means that the gravity of the Moon and Earth will do the work of getting it back home over the next eight…

Lumpy, dirty piles of snow, shading to slush and then water, surround an unused rink. In the background, a featureless wall of grey, and a swollen cloud that threatens if not rain then no immediate prospect of sunshine. Deciduous trees bare their branches. In the distance, a single, unlovely apartment building dominates a skyline of single-family homes. In the foreground, atop a grey-brown ice…

I remember when _Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs_ came out. I saw it in the dollar theater in college, and I came out kind of obsessed. I went to IMDb to figure out who was behind it, and that was my introduction to Lord and Miller.

In the world of modern filmmaking, few have mastered the blend of chaotic energy and heartfelt storytelling quite like Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

I'll say up…

The second government shutdown of the year, this one affecting only the Department of Homeland Security, went into effect on Feb. 14. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are still being funded by last year's One Big Beautiful Bill, and FEMA and the Coast Guard have funds to pay employees for several months, the Transportation Security…

The _Washington Post_ brings us a story today that could only be produced by Donald Trump's administration of influencers. According to two sources who spoke to the _Post_ under the condition of anonymity, photographers from several news outlets were banned from Pentagon press briefings because they had previously published photos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's staff found…