Home Blog Page 41

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 With Specialized Agent Models, Including One Whose Entire Job Is Talking to the Other Agents

Lena Wexler
-
0
Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 With Specialized Agent Models, Including One Whose Entire Job Is Talking to the Other Agents

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google on Tuesday rolled out Gemini 2.5, a flagship update introducing what the company is calling “specialized agent architecture,” a suite of purpose-built AI models that includes one agent dedicated to scheduling, one to research, one to coding, and at least one whose sole responsibility appears to be coordinating the other agents because they have apparently stopped speaking to each other.

In a launch keynote streamed from a glass-walled room with the acoustics of a high-end yogurt commercial, Google DeepMind executives demonstrated how Gemini 2.5’s agents can independently book a flight, draft a follow-up email, and rewrite the follow-up email after a second agent flagged it as “too curt for Q2.”

“What we’re really excited about is the orchestration layer,” said Anjali Pradhan, a Google product lead whose title fit on the badge only in eight-point type. “Previous models tried to do everything in one context window, which created friction. Now each agent has a defined role, and a separate agent ensures they collaborate, and a third agent monitors that collaboration for compliance, and a fourth summarizes the whole exchange into a paragraph the user can ignore.”

Early benchmarks confirm Gemini 2.5 is the most capable model Google has ever shipped, scoring above competitors on reasoning, coding, and the increasingly important benchmark of “convincingly pretending to have read the attachment.” The company said the planning agent alone can break a complex task into as many as 240 subtasks, 239 of which are scheduling a meeting to discuss the first one.

Asked about energy usage, Google noted that Gemini 2.5 is “meaningfully more efficient per token” than its predecessor, a metric that becomes less reassuring once one learns the model is now generating roughly seventy times more tokens per query, most of them produced by agents asking each other to clarify earlier agents. A company sustainability report described the net environmental impact as “directionally encouraging,” a phrase the report’s authors used four times.

The launch arrives during a stretch in which every major tech company has pivoted to “agents” as the next inevitable computing paradigm, on the theory that consumers, having mastered typing things into a box, are now ready for a box that types things into other boxes on their behalf. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all expected to ship comparable agent suites within weeks, after which the agents will presumably begin negotiating with each other across platforms, generating a global volume of synthetic email that will require its own agent to triage.

Reaction among developers was cautiously enthusiastic. “It’s genuinely impressive,” said Marcus Thiele, a senior engineer at a mid-sized fintech who spent Tuesday afternoon watching a Gemini coding agent debug a problem caused by a Gemini deployment agent. “Although at some point I did notice I was just sitting there, and the agents were having a whole work life without me, and I started to wonder what the company was paying me for. Then an agent emailed to schedule a one-on-one about it.”

Google declined to specify the launch’s water and electricity footprint, citing competitive sensitivity, but a spokesperson confirmed the company remains “on track” to meet its 2030 net-zero targets, which were set in 2021, before anyone at Google had heard the word “agentic.” The same spokesperson clarified that the targets had not been revised, only “recontextualized.”

At press time, the orchestration agent had successfully delegated the writing of this article’s final sentence to four other agents, none of whom were responding.

Two Schools Fired Their Coaches Before the Charter Plane Landed and Both Press Releases Used the Word ‘Family’

Duke Holloway
-
0
Two Schools Fired Their Coaches Before the Charter Plane Landed and Both Press Releases Used the Word ‘Family’

It’s 9:18 on Monday morning and I have already received three Google alerts about head coaches who have been graciously thanked for their service, wished the very best in their next chapter, and asked very politely to be out of the office by Wednesday. One of the press releases used the word family. The other one used the word family twice. The third one used the phrase mutual decision, which is the kind of thing two people say when only one of them is doing the deciding and the other one is finding out about it on a charter flight somewhere over Indianapolis.

The team lost on Saturday afternoon. The plane landed Saturday night. The athletic director’s statement went up Sunday at 11:47 p.m. — late enough that the local paper couldn’t get to it, early enough that the morning shows could lead with it. The whole thing is choreographed now. I half expect them to release a teaser trailer.

Coach DiMaggio coached us for 31 years and the only time he ever left the program was when he had a heart attack in the parking lot after a JV scrimmage in 1986. They named the field after him. They didn’t name a search firm after him. There was no hashtag. There was a casserole tour at his widow’s house that lasted into June. That was the contract: you coached the boys, the boys grew up, you got buried in the cemetery on Route 9. Mutual decision my foot.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:40 this morning, which is roughly when Ray calls me about anything that has wounded him, and he was wounded. His alma mater fired the guy who took them to two NITs and a Sweet 16, and the press release thanked him for being, and I am quoting Ray quoting the release, “a builder of men and a steward of the brand.” Ray said the word brand into the phone like it was a piece of food he was trying to dislodge. Ray played one year of small-college baseball forty years ago and now somebody is the steward of his brand. He is, understandably, going through it.

The athletic director who fired this man hired him four years ago at a press conference where he used the word marriage. I am not making that up. He stood at a podium with a school-colored tie and said this is a marriage. Now he is at a different podium with a different school-colored tie talking about a new direction and a national search, and there is a guy behind him from a search firm called something like Pinnacle Pursuit Partners whose entire business model is being on retainer the Friday before the first weekend of the tournament. He had the buyout language drafted by Thursday. The coach was up 11 at the half. Didn’t matter. Pinnacle Pursuit was already pursuing.

The buyout, by the way, is $14.7 million. They are paying a man $14.7 million to not coach their basketball team. Last week the same school sent me — and I am on their alumni list because I once wrote a flattering column about a kid from there in 1991 — an email asking if I would consider a recurring monthly gift of $19 to support the marching band’s travel fund. The marching band has to fundraise. The basketball coach gets a yacht for losing in the second round. I’m not bitter. I’m just keeping score, which is, I have been told, the entire point of sports.

And the new search, oh boy, the new search. They have a list. They had the list before they fired the guy. The list is the same six guys it always is — a mid-major coach who is about to take the job, an NBA assistant whose agent leaked it, a retread who got fired from a bigger job two years ago and has since grown a beard, an offensive-minded coach, a defensive-minded coach, and a guy named Bruce. There is always a Bruce. The Bruce never gets the job but his name keeps the boosters warm for 72 hours, which is its own kind of service.

Petey Corrigan, who was the AD at the high school for 22 years and ran the snack stand on Friday nights because nobody else would, used to say that you don’t fire a coach the Monday after a loss because Monday is when you find out who he is. He meant it as wisdom. Nobody listens to Petey. Petey is dead. The new ADs go to a conference in Phoenix where someone teaches them how to write a press release that uses the word family without making anyone laugh, and they come home and they fire the coach by sundown.

Denise is bringing chili over for the Sweet 16. She says it’s from a podcast. I told her I don’t want to know whose podcast. She said good, because the guy got fired Friday.

Went to Murphy’s to Watch the Round of 32 and Realized I Was the Only Person in the Bar Watching the Round of 32

Duke Holloway
-
0
Went to Murphy’s to Watch the Round of 32 and Realized I Was the Only Person in the Bar Watching the Round of 32

I walked into Murphy’s around two o’clock Saturday with the simple, almost embarrassingly old-fashioned goal of watching a basketball game. There were six televisions. There were probably forty men. There was, by my unofficial count, one set of eyeballs aimed at any of the screens, and they were mine.

Everybody else was looking at a phone. Hunched over it like they were defusing something. Every fifteen seconds somebody at the bar would jerk upright and shout a sentence that meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t downloaded an app in the last six months. “Come on, McNeese over by four and a half.” “I need the under in Ole Miss for the cash-out.” “Baby, baby, baby, second-half three-pointers, give me daylight.” Grown men. With kids. With knees that don’t work.

Ray Kowalczyk was at the corner table holding a phone in each hand like he was landing a 727. He had a six-leg parlay across four games and one of the legs was a Drake player whose name he was pronouncing three different ways depending on whether the kid had the ball. Ray hasn’t watched a full forty minutes of college basketball since 2003, but he could tell you that this young man needed exactly one more assist and a made free throw to send Ray’s seventeen dollars into one hundred and forty-two. He explained this to me twice. I had not asked.

Coach DiMaggio used to make us watch tape on Sunday mornings before church. He’d run the projector himself and stop it on a single frame and say, “Boys, look at his feet. The feet tell you everything.” I thought about Coach DiMaggio at Murphy’s on Saturday because somewhere on one of the six televisions a kid from a school I’d never heard of had set the most beautifully patient down-screen I’d seen in a month, and the only person in the building who noticed was a retired football coach drinking a club soda. The feet told me everything. There was nobody to tell.

The kid behind the bar — couldn’t have been twenty-three, sleeves of tattoos that looked like a children’s encyclopedia — leaned over and asked if I wanted to “get on something.” He said it the way a Jehovah’s Witness asks if you’ve considered the literature. I told him I was just here for the game. He looked at me with what I can only describe as polite anthropological interest, the way you’d look at a man who showed up to a wedding with a fax machine.

Here is the part that broke me. The televisions themselves are now in on it. Down at the bottom of the screen, while actual human beings ran an actual offense, there was a little ticker informing me of the live odds, the spread movement, the player props, and something called a “SGP boost.” During free throws they cut to a graphic of a cartoon lion holding a parlay slip. I am not making this up. A cartoon lion. CBS used to put up a graphic that said HOOSIERS 42, PURDUE 38 and that was the entire conversation. Now the screen looks like the dashboard of a fighter jet being flown by a man who owes money.

Around three forty-five something genuinely incredible happened in one of the games — a kid threw in a runner from about twenty-six feet at the buzzer to send it to overtime — and Murphy’s did not react. Not a flinch. Two seconds later the same room exploded into a noise I will hear in my dreams, and it was because somebody named Tre had just gotten his fourth rebound, which apparently completed the back end of a same-game parlay involving a guy in Spokane and Ray’s brother-in-law in Toledo. They hugged. Two of them hugged. Over a fourth rebound by a man none of them could pick out of a lineup.

I sat there with my club soda and I thought, all right, fine, this is what it is now, the game is the soundtrack, the betting slip is the show. But then for about ten seconds in the second half a point guard from a 14 seed picked a press apart with a behind-the-back pass off a curl, and somewhere underneath the cartoon lion and the parlay screams and the TVs yelling at me about a SGP boost, there was still a basketball game being played by young men who are very, very good at it. Coach DiMaggio would have stopped the projector. The feet told you everything.

Denise is bringing chili over tonight for the late games. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to watch on the small set in the den with the sound on the broadcast and my phone face-down in the kitchen drawer where it belongs.

My Buddy Ray Just Became a ‘Founding Member’ of His Alma Mater’s NIL Collective and the Welcome Packet Came With a Quarter-Zip

Duke Holloway
-
0
My Buddy Ray Just Became a ‘Founding Member’ of His Alma Mater’s NIL Collective and the Welcome Packet Came With a Quarter-Zip

Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday morning, which is a thing Ray does only when he has news, a death in the family, or a new grievance about his cable bill. This was option four, which I didn’t know existed.

Ray is now, and I am quoting the laminated card he was mailed, a ‘Founding Member’ of something called the Hoosier Vault Collective. It costs him $79 a month. He gets a quarter-zip, a window decal, a quarterly newsletter, and what the brochure calls ‘a seat at the table.’ I asked what table. He said he didn’t know yet but he was hoping it was the one with the buffet at the spring banquet.

For those of you blessed enough not to have a Ray in your life, an NIL collective is what happens when a booster club hires a graphic designer. It is a 501(c)(something) that exists to pay college athletes for the use of their name, image, and likeness, which is a fancy way of saying it pays them to play, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a booster club. We’ve made a full lap around the parking lot and ended up exactly where we started, only now there’s a logo and a podcast.

I asked Ray which Indiana athletes the Hoosier Vault is currently supporting. He paused for the kind of beat a guy takes when he’s about to make something up. Then he said, ‘All of them.’ I asked him to name three. He named two basketball players, both of whom transferred in January. The Vault, apparently, is not a subscription service that updates the roster in real time.

Coach DiMaggio’s idea of NIL, back when I was twenty-two and being paid $4,800 a year to coach a Pennsylvania high school football team into the ground, was slipping a kid a Sunoco gas card if his mother was working two shifts. He called it ‘helping out.’ Nobody mailed him a quarter-zip for it. Nobody made him a Founding Member. The transaction was that the kid got to school on time and didn’t tell anybody, and Coach got to keep doing the only thing he was qualified to do, which was yell at teenagers in a polyester shirt.

What gets me about the Vault, and the Forge, and the Crimson Collective, and the Bluegrass Reserve, and whichever one your school is leaning on you to join — and they are all named, I have noticed, like premium bourbons or off-brand cryptocurrencies — is the merch. Ray sent me a picture of his quarter-zip. It has a stitched logo that looks like a shield being struck by lightning over a wheat sheaf. I have seen actual Indiana athletic department gear that was less designed than this. The collective is outproducing the school.

My grandson Eli, who is fourteen and plays travel baseball for an organization that has its own Instagram strategist, came over Sunday and informed me his program is ‘in talks’ to launch what he called a ‘youth NIL pilot.’ I asked him what that meant. He said some of the kids would get small stipends if they hit certain Instagram follower thresholds. He said this the way I used to say I wanted to be a fireman. Calmly. Like it was a job. He is in the eighth grade, and the algorithm is now part of his swing.

And meanwhile the Sweet Sixteen kicks off tonight, and every kid out there is a millionaire, or thinks he is, or is about to be told he isn’t and should hit the portal. Petey Corrigan, the toughest pulling guard I ever coached, who pulled lake ice out of his pickup with bare hands in February of ’78, would have looked at a Founding Member quarter-zip and asked who he had to fight to get out of wearing it. Petey is now sixty-six and runs a hardware store in Altoona. Nobody has ever offered him a seat at any table.

Ray says the Vault is having a ‘members-only watch party’ at a Hilton ballroom outside Indianapolis tonight. He’s driving down with his cousin. There will be a cash bar, a step-and-repeat, and what the email promised is ‘a special video message from a current student-athlete.’ Ray is very excited. I told him to bring me back a window decal.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

A Kid on the Losing Team Last Night Was in the Transfer Portal Before His Mother Got Home From the Arena

Duke Holloway
-
0
A Kid on the Losing Team Last Night Was in the Transfer Portal Before His Mother Got Home From the Arena

The buzzer hadn’t been done buzzing for ninety seconds and the chyron at the bottom of my television was already running a graphic about which of the losing team’s freshmen had ‘opened conversations’ about their future. Opened conversations. The kid was still in his uniform. His mother was still in the parking lot waiting for the shuttle. And ESPN had a logo for it — a little suitcase with wings, animated, presented like a weather alert.

I have been writing about basketball since the rim was a rumor, and I have to tell you, friends, the saddest sound in sports right now is a college coach finding out from Twitter which of his players is leaving him. Used to be a kid would walk into the office. Used to be there’d be a handshake and a couple lies told over coffee. Now it’s a graphic. With a suitcase. That has wings.

Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program back when men wore neckties to bench-coach a JV game, used to say that a roster was a promise. He’d say it real quiet, the way he said most things he believed, and then he’d go yell at a sophomore for an hour about footwork. He died in 2009 and I am thankful every day that he did not live to see a sidebar on a sports network listing twelve nineteen-year-olds who are ‘evaluating their options’ before the floor has been swept.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at quarter to eleven last night, which is two hours past Ray’s bedtime, just to ask me what an NIL collective is. I told him it’s a group of dentists and Buick dealers in a chat thread who pool money to pay a 6’4 wing from Lithuania to wear their school’s uniform for eight months. Ray was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Duke, that’s just the Yankees.’ And you know what? Ray Kowalczyk has never once been wrong about anything important, and he wasn’t wrong last night either.

The thing that gets me — and I want to be careful here, because it’s not the kids’ fault, none of this is the kids’ fault, the kids are doing exactly what every adult in their life has told them to do — is that we used to have a thing called a senior year. A senior would walk out of the tunnel one last time and the building would stand up. Now we have what amounts to a reverse draft, conducted on Instagram, in which a young man’s last college game is announced retroactively after he’s already in a Buick driving to a different state.

I knew a kid named Petey Corrigan who played four years at a small Catholic school nobody’s heard of, averaged six points a game, set picks like a man trying to put his shoulder through a barn door, and graduated on time with a degree in something practical. Petey is now an assistant principal in Erie, Pennsylvania. He owns a house. His knees don’t work. He calls his old coach on Father’s Day. I am not telling you Petey’s life is better than the kid in the suitcase graphic — that’s not for me to say. I’m just telling you Petey exists. Existed. Is a person.

Meanwhile the bracket app on my phone now has a feature called Portal Watch, which sends you a push notification every time a player from a team you picked enters the open market. I picked Drake to win in the first round, and at 11:47 last night my phone buzzed and informed me that two Drake players were ‘exploring opportunities elsewhere,’ which is a phrase that should never appear in a sentence about a 20-year-old who scored eight points in a basketball game. They hadn’t even been eliminated yet. They were ahead, by the way. They won.

I don’t want to be the old man yelling at the cloud. I want to be the old man yelling at the specific, identifiable individuals who decided that the back end of a college basketball broadcast should look like the trade deadline on cable news. I want to know who the suitcase guy is. I want a name. I want to ask him, gently, in person, what he thinks his grandfather would say.

Denise is bringing chili over for the late games tonight. She says it’s from a podcast. I asked her if the podcast had a suitcase logo and she told me to get my own dinner.

The IOC Just Elected Its First President Who Has Actually Gotten in the Pool, and They Want a Parade for It

Duke Holloway
-
0
The IOC Just Elected Its First President Who Has Actually Gotten in the Pool, and They Want a Parade for It

Kirsty Coventry won her first Olympic medal in Athens in 2004, swimming the 200 backstroke in a time most of us couldn’t manage if you put a great white shark in lane two. She won six more after that. On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee elected her president, making her the first woman and the first African to hold the job in 131 years, and the organization is acting like it just split the atom.

I want to be clear about Coventry. The woman is the real article. She’s a seven-time Olympic medalist from Zimbabwe who got in the water at five in the morning for twenty years and came out of it with hardware nobody can take off her. If you’ve ever swum a 200 back, you understand. If you haven’t, just know that the last fifty meters feels like trying to outrun a memory of yourself. She earned the chair.

The IOC, however, has earned nothing, and is taking a victory lap anyway. The press release used the word “historic” four times in two paragraphs, which is the linguistic equivalent of a guy holding the door for one woman in 1974 and bringing it up at every Christmas dinner since. It took them a hundred and thirty-one years and seven previous presidents — six counts, one barons, and one marquis, I’m not making any of that up — to elect somebody who has actually competed in the Olympics. The bar wasn’t on the floor. The bar was buried.

Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, had a PE teacher down the hall named Mrs. Bevilacqua who in 1962 could outrun every boy in the building, including the seniors, including the kid who eventually walked on at Penn State. Nobody put out a press release. She just kept showing up at six in the morning and beating people. Coach used to say leadership wasn’t a thing you announced, it was a thing other people noticed about you eventually, usually after the fact. He’d have looked at this IOC business and said something unprintable and gone back to lining the field.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday afternoon, as he does whenever sports does something he doesn’t understand, which is most days now. “Duke,” he said, “is it a big deal or isn’t it.” I told him it was a big deal because of who she is and a small deal because of who they are, and Ray said that was the most diplomatic thing he’d ever heard come out of my mouth and he didn’t trust it. He’s right not to.

Because here’s the thing about the IOC. It is not a sports organization. It is a travel club for men in blazers who hold their meetings in Lausanne and refer to themselves as “members” the way people in cults refer to themselves as members. They have a per diem that would embarrass a cardinal. They award the Olympics to whichever government is most willing to bulldoze a neighborhood and call it a legacy project. They spent the last thirty years giving the Games to autocrats and acting surprised when the autocrats used them like autocrats use everything. And now they have appointed an actual swimmer to run it, which I suspect is going to feel, for the IOC, a little bit like sobering up at a wedding.

Coventry is going to walk into a job where the actual sport — the kid in Botswana with a stopwatch and a dream, the gymnast in Romania, the rower from a country I have to look up — is item nineteen on a forty-item agenda. Items one through eighteen are sponsorship tiers, broadcast rights, the Saudi question, the Russia question, the doping question that nobody wants to actually answer, and whether breakdancing gets a second chance. I wish her luck. I mean it. The athletes deserve someone in that chair who has been cold and tired and underwater at five in the morning, and now they have one.

What they don’t have, and what nobody ever has, is an IOC that deserves its own employees. The minute Coventry tries to clean up something real, the blazers are going to remember they preferred a count. Watch.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. She heard about Coventry on a podcast and asked me if it was a big deal. I said it was a big deal for Coventry and a small deal for the IOC and Denise said that was the most diplomatic thing she’d ever heard come out of my mouth and she didn’t trust it either. The chili, for the record, is excellent.

The First Four Is in Dayton Because Dayton Is the Last City in America That Still Shows Up Without Being Asked

Duke Holloway
-
0
The First Four Is in Dayton Because Dayton Is the Last City in America That Still Shows Up Without Being Asked

I watched two of the First Four last night on a television old enough to vote. Got up off my chair four times — twice for snacks, twice because I was actually moved by something. Two teams from places you have to find on a map, playing their hearts out in front of a crowd that had driven eight hours to be there. Couldn’t tell you the final score now if you held a gun to me. Could tell you exactly what one of those kids’ mothers looked like in the eighth row.

The First Four happens in Dayton, Ohio because Dayton is the last city left that does not believe itself too good for what it has. They put up a sign. They open the doors. They sell popcorn. The popcorn is fine. There is no parlay-app cartoon goat hovering above the parking lot. There is just a parking lot.

The bracket apps had already updated by the time I brushed my teeth. The teams that lost last night don’t exist anymore — wiped out of the database faster than Coach DiMaggio used to wipe a chalkboard with the back of his hand. He used to say a man who plays a game and then disappears from the box score is still a man who played a game. Try telling that to ESPN’s bracket optimizer. The optimizer does not return calls.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:30 last night, which I should mention is also 11:30 his time, because we live four blocks from each other. “You watching this?” he said. I said yes. He said, “The kid with the headband — he’s playing like he means it.” Then he hung up. That was the whole call. That is a sportsman.

Meanwhile the prime-time boys won’t get on the floor until this afternoon, and they’ll do it after a forty-eight-minute pregame show that includes a segment called something like “The Madness Index,” in which a man in a vest assigns each team a vibe score from 1 to 100. There are graphics. There is a horn. There is a former point guard saying the word “energy” eighty-one times in a row. There is, every commercial break, an ad in which an animated goat tells you Bryant minus the points is a lock. The goat sounds confident. The goat is 9–and–14.

Petey Corrigan, who used to officiate eighth-grade CYO games for fourteen dollars and a slice of pizza, would have died for the chance to officiate a First Four game. He’d have died for it. He told me once that the games nobody watches are the only games that mean anything, because the men playing them know nobody is watching and they play hard anyway. Then he asked me for the fourteen dollars.

I’m told one of those kids on the floor last night is averaging 23 a game and is, as of this morning, in the transfer portal. He has not announced a transfer. He is still on his team. He is in the portal preemptively, the way you might leave the back door unlocked while you walk to the mailbox. Coach DiMaggio is rolling so hard in his grave they’re going to have to re-pour the headstone by Friday.

But that kid played 38 minutes last night. He played them in Dayton. He played them in front of his mother in the eighth row, and a crowd that drove eight hours to be there, and a fat old sportswriter in his garage who got up four times. Whatever happens to him in April, in May, in some collective somewhere with a logo on the wall — he gave Tuesday night everything he had, and Tuesday night doesn’t owe him a thing back. That’s the contract. That’s the last clean contract left in this sport, and they sign it every year in a 13,000-seat building in southwest Ohio while the bracket apps look the other way.

Denise is making chili. She heard about it on a podcast. The podcast is called “Bracketology With Brent” and Denise does not, to my knowledge, watch college basketball. The chili is excellent. I’ll be in the garage.

Boeing Astronauts Return After 9-Month ‘Eight-Day Mission,’ Receive $40 Voucher Toward Their Next Stranding

Lena Wexler
-
0
Boeing Astronauts Return After 9-Month ‘Eight-Day Mission,’ Receive $40 Voucher Toward Their Next Stranding

OFF THE COAST OF TALLAHASSEE, FL — NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore splashed down in the Gulf on Tuesday evening after a Boeing Starliner mission that was originally scheduled to last eight days and instead lasted approximately one full pregnancy, emerging from the capsule visibly thinner, visibly older, and clutching a Boeing customer satisfaction survey that a recovery diver had handed them through the hatch.

The pair had been stuck aboard the International Space Station since June after their Starliner capsule, marketed in 2019 promotional materials as ‘the most reliable ride to low-Earth orbit,’ developed helium leaks, thruster failures, and what one engineer described as ‘a lot of noises we did not anticipate the spacecraft to be making.’ NASA ultimately sent the capsule home empty rather than risk putting humans inside it, a decision Boeing has politely characterized as ‘an abundance of caution’ and everyone else has characterized as ‘correct.’

‘We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Butch and Suni home, and Boeing is proud to have played a role in their journey,’ said Boeing spokesperson Marissa Trent-Holloway, who declined to specify which role. ‘As a token of our appreciation, both astronauts will receive a $40 credit applicable toward any future Starliner mission, plus a complimentary upgrade to the seat with the working thruster.’

Williams and Wilmore reportedly spent the unplanned 286 additional days conducting science experiments, performing station maintenance, and watching their once-temporary toiletry kits achieve a kind of permanent residency. Wilmore is said to have grown a beard, lost it, grown it back, and lost it again on a timeline that NASA flight surgeons described as ’emotionally legible.’ Williams used the extended stay to break the record for total spacewalk time by a woman, an achievement she did not pursue so much as accidentally back into.

Dr. Helena Voss, an aerospace systems analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the mission underscores a broader pattern in the privatized space economy. ‘There’s an old joke that NASA used to over-engineer everything and now contractors under-engineer everything,’ Voss said. ‘The Starliner program is what happens when you let the people who built the 737 MAX design something that also has to come back down.’ She added that Boeing has been paid roughly $4.2 billion for Starliner to date, or approximately $14.7 million per day Williams and Wilmore were not supposed to be up there.

SpaceX, which ultimately ferried the astronauts home aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, declined to gloat publicly, though Elon Musk posted a photo of the splashdown on X with the caption ‘🫡’ followed eleven minutes later by a second post reading ‘just sayin’.’ Boeing executives are reportedly working on a comprehensive Starliner improvement plan that one source described as ‘mostly a list of things we already told them in 2019.’

Asked at a brief press availability whether they would fly Starliner again, Wilmore offered a long pause, a small smile, and the words ‘I have a lot of confidence in the NASA assignment process,’ which reporters took to mean no. Williams, when pressed, said she was looking forward to seeing her dogs, eating a salad, and standing on a surface that does not require her to also be strapped to it.

The astronauts will undergo several weeks of rehabilitation as their bodies readjust to gravity. Boeing’s stock closed up 1.4 percent on the news, on optimism that the company had finally finished the mission it started.

Chicago River Submits Two Weeks’ Notice After 63rd Consecutive Green Dye Job

Tara Sparks
-
0
Chicago River Submits Two Weeks’ Notice After 63rd Consecutive Green Dye Job

CHICAGO, IL — After being doused in 40 pounds of fluorescent vegetable dye for the 63rd consecutive March, the Chicago River formally submitted its two weeks’ notice Monday morning, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the city of Chicago and a profound need to “go find itself, possibly in Wisconsin.”

The resignation, hand-delivered to the Mayor’s office in a soggy manila envelope shortly after sunrise, marks the first time a major American waterway has voluntarily severed employment with a metropolitan area, according to officials, who conceded they had not been aware the river was technically employed in the first place.

“She’s been holding this in for decades,” said Marla Penhaligon, a freelance hydrology consultant who has been informally representing the river since 2019. “Every March, same thing. Boats. Dye. Three guys from Naperville in ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ tank tops Venmo-ing each other for Jameson shots over her face. At a certain point a body of water just snaps.”

In a 14-page statement posted to the river’s newly launched Substack, titled Currents, the waterway accused Plumbers Local 130 of “showing up unannounced once a year like an ex,” described the dye as “tasting vaguely of a dentist’s office,” and demanded retroactive compensation for an estimated 1.7 million unpaid hours of scenic engagement-photo background work.

Mayor Brandon Johnson called the resignation “deeply unfortunate” and “honestly kind of dramatic,” noting that the river had agreed to the arrangement in 1962 and had not raised concerns at any of the 62 subsequent dyeings. Parade organizers said they were blindsided, with one float coordinator confirming the news had cast a brief pall over an otherwise tremendous morning of corned beef and projectile vomiting.

The river’s grievances reportedly extend well beyond the dye itself. Listed alongside the chemical complaints were a kayaker who screamed “I’M IRISH TOO” directly into its surface in 2017, a viral Instagram caption referring to it as “thicc,” and the unrelenting presence of the Riverwalk’s saxophone busker, whom the river described in the filing only as “a man with whom I have things to say.”

City Hall has reportedly entered emergency negotiations, offering a four-day workweek, a 12% raise, and the immediate removal of a duck the river described as “a known menace.” Sources close to the talks say the river is “listening but not committing,” and has separately retained representation from the same agent who handled the Cuyahoga’s 2019 image rehabilitation campaign.

As of press time, the Hudson River had declined to comment on whether it would consider similar action, telling reporters only that it had “made peace with what it is,” and that it had bigger things on its mind currently, including a Citi Bike, a possum, and what appeared to be the entire bottom half of a Vespa.

Joe Lunardi Told Us the Bracket Three Weeks Ago and We Will Still Pretend to Gasp Tonight at 6

Duke Holloway
-
0
Joe Lunardi Told Us the Bracket Three Weeks Ago and We Will Still Pretend to Gasp Tonight at 6

I have known the bracket since Tuesday. So have you. So has my mailman, my dentist, the woman who stocks the Pepsi at the gas station, and at least one of my grandchildren. CBS knows we know. CBS knows we know that CBS knows we know. And at six o’clock tonight CBS will roll out a two-hour broadcast pretending none of us has ever seen a basketball schedule, and we will sit there and let them.

Joe Lunardi has been publishing bracket projections since the leaves were still on the trees. By February the man had filed somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-seven brackets, each one varying from the last by exactly the seeding of one team from the Mountain West. By March he is essentially the bracket. The committee meets in a conference room in Indianapolis and follows along on his ESPN page. I am not entirely sure they bother with their own list anymore.

And yet the Selection Show, which used to last thirty minutes and consisted of a man with a marker drawing on a board, has now ballooned into something the network treats like the lunar landing. Two hours. Three hours if you count the pregame. Charles Barkley is involved somehow. Greg Gumbel, God rest him, used to read the bracket like he was reading a grocery list, and that was the right way to do it. Now we get dramatic music, we get teaser cuts, we get a man named Seth saying “buckle up, folks” before he reveals that Auburn is a one seed, which Auburn has been a one seed since January.

The worst innovation, by a country mile, is the Snub Segment. They put a camera in some poor mid-major’s gymnasium, a hundred kids in matching warm-ups holding pizza, and when the school doesn’t get called the camera lingers on a sophomore guard from Indianapolis trying not to cry on national television. This is presented as drama. This is presented as content. I don’t know what we did as a country to deserve being shown a teenager’s worst Sunday, but here we are, with a sideline reporter asking him how it feels.

Then they cut to the committee chair, who comes on looking like a deacon delivering bad news to a congregation. He uses words like “body of work” and “résumé” and “metrics suggested.” The committee chair is the Pope of college basketball for one Sunday a year, and he will, before the night is out, have to defend why a team from the Big East is a nine seed and not an eight, which is the kind of distinction that matters to exactly one fan base and exactly one gambling syndicate in New Jersey.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at four-fifteen this afternoon. Ray is a Marquette man, has been since 1962, and he wanted me to know that if Marquette gets a five seed and ends up in Spokane he is going to “raise hell.” I asked him with whom. He said he had not figured that part out yet. Ray will watch the show. Ray will yell at the show. Ray will then eat a sandwich and call me back.

My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, ran our school’s bracket pool on a legal pad. Twenty-five names, two dollars apiece, and he kept the cash in a Folgers can in the equipment shed. The whole operation took about six minutes. The pool would close before the play-in games — back when there were no play-in games, just sixty-four teams, the right number — and on Monday morning the pad would be pinned to the bulletin board outside the gym. Nobody filmed anybody crying. The bracket was the bracket. You won or you didn’t.

Somewhere in the middle of the third hour tonight, they will get around to previewing actual basketball. Maybe ninety seconds on a twelve-five upset pick. A graphic with arrows. Then back to four men in suits arguing about whether North Carolina deserved a bid, which they did not, and which the committee chair will have to recuse himself from, which is its own kind of comedy if you have the stomach for it.

I will watch all of it. I always do. The bracket is the bracket and the show is the show and complaining about the show is, at this point, part of the show. Petey Corrigan from the bowling alley will text me at seven-thirty asking who I have in the Final Four, and I will tell him the same four teams I tell him every year, and he will lose his pool to his nine-year-old niece, who picked by uniform color.

Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast.

1...404142...52Page 41 of 52