In order to resolve a class action lawsuit alleging that the company monopolized the agricultural equipment repair market by purposefully preventing farmers and independent shops from obtaining the diagnostic software and tools required to service their own equipment, John Deere agreed to pay $99 million. The case was filed as a multi-district complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2022. It claimed that Deere had purposefully designed a system in which an authorized John Deere dealership was the only feasible route to a functional tractor. Deere “wields significant economic power” greater than the combined strength of its next two largest rivals, Case New Holland and Kubota, according to the lawsuit. The business reached a settlement without acknowledging any misconduct.

Sitting with this number is worthwhile. In fiscal year 2025, John Deere reported a profit of $5.027 billion. Approximately one-fifth of a single year’s earnings are represented by the $99 million settlement. For background, the public interest advocacy group U.S. PIRG, which has been monitoring this battle for years, calculated that repair restrictions imposed by all manufacturers of agricultural equipment cost American farmers about $4.2 billion a year. In that sense, the settlement is more of a rounding error than a reckoning. However, the more general terms associated with it are more significant than the check itself.

Deere is required by the agreement to provide farmers and independent repair shops with diagnostic tools and repair resources for a minimum of ten years. The right-to-repair movement has been advocating for access as well as money. the option to contact someone other than the closest Deere dealership if a farmer has a broken combine during harvest week. The ability to identify a fault code on a machine located in a field twenty miles from the closest town without having to wait days for a technician authorized by the factory. In the words of U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor, “The most important thing is for farmers to be able to fix their stuff.” It shouldn’t be necessary to say that sentence. It did for years.

Farmers’ own skepticism has been audible and warranted. Close observers of this case quickly noted that most individual farmers might receive between $300 and $400 after legal fees, administrative expenses, and distribution among an estimated 200,000 eligible claimants. The cost of a single dealer service visit may exceed that amount. A more direct statement was made in a Reddit thread about the announcement: “Here’s your $300 peasant, you’re still not allowed to fix the things you own.” That sentiment, though unfiltered, expresses a genuine annoyance: class action settlements of this type typically feel more like closure for attorneys than justice for those who filed.

It’s also difficult to ignore the fact that Deere has previously traveled this path. In 2023, the business agreed to enhance repair access in a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation. At the time, critics referred to it as a document full of loopholes, pointing out that Deere could still classify nearly anything as a trade secret or a safety feature in order to prevent access. A close reader of that MOU also pointed out a clause in which the Farm Bureau agreed to discourage state right-to-repair legislation that went beyond what Deere had promised, thereby suppressing the very laws that farmers needed through the use of a farmer advocacy group. Even after a $99 million settlement was reached, the suspicion hasn’t completely disappeared because of this kind of maneuvering.

The Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit is another minor issue that hasn’t been resolved. The FTC lawsuit, which was filed in 2025, essentially restates the class action’s claims that Deere unlawfully prevented independent technicians and farmers from fixing its machinery. Deere is still required to respond in court to the government’s version of these accusations after a federal judge denied the company’s request to have that case dismissed in June of last year. Deere gains some goodwill from the civil settlement. The antitrust exposure does not go away.

Denver Caldwell, vice president of aftermarket and customer support at John Deere, presented the settlement in terms of dedication and innovation, citing the company’s Operations Center Pro Service tool as proof of real advancement. He might be correct that the company has actually changed its stance. It’s also possible that the old approach was too costly to continue due to years of legal pressure, FTC scrutiny, and waning public goodwill—John Deere went from being a cherished rural institution to a corporate villain in about ten years. The company that used to have John Deere stickers on every Wisconsin barn door is now the one that people bring up when discussing the need for right-to-repair legislation. No settlement document adequately explains that reputational shift, and it is difficult to undo.

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The details of Leslie Kuhn’s lawsuit, which she filed in New York State Court on April 6, 2026, are so vivid that they immediately appeared in entertainment media. In September 2022, Kuhn started working for Stern as the Howard Stern Show’s office manager at SiriusXM. She was elevated to executive assistant at Stern’s production company, One Twelve, by January 2024. Then, in May 2024, she was asked to move to the Sterns’ estate in Southampton, New York, called Oceanview, a 20,000-square-foot property valued at approximately $50 million. Her responsibilities there included scheduling, managing household employees, processing payroll, and helping with what the complaint refers to as Beth Stern’s “extensive at-home feline rescue and fostering operations.”

As a board member and national spokesperson for North Shore Animal League America, Beth Stern has long been an advocate for animal welfare. According to the lawsuit, she fosters a large number of stray dogs and cats at the family’s house, which Kuhn characterizes as “irresponsible and untenable” conditions. Although the complaint doesn’t provide precise figures or incidents, its language is direct: it claims that the animal rescue operation created “immense pressures on the household” and directly contributed to the hostile environment that Kuhn claims she encountered. That accusation has an odd specificity: it’s not financial misconduct or a shouting match, but rather the pressure of a large-scale animal welfare operation operating inside a private home against the backdrop of a demanding executive role.

Important Information: Howard Stern Lawsuit — Leslie Kuhn v. Howard Stern et al.

Kuhn’s employers gave her what seemed to be a big vote of confidence in December 2025. Her yearly salary was increased from $100,000 to $265,000. A bonus of $80,000 was promised. It’s the kind of package that implies her work was appreciated, at the very least. She was let go in February 2026, six weeks later. According to the lawsuit, the stated reason was “misconduct of a nature that would be detrimental to one’s reputation.” Kuhn completely disputes the description, claiming that it was made up, specifically by Beth Stern, according to the complaint.

The fact that Kuhn is not pursuing monetary damages is what makes the case unique and has garnered the greatest attention. A court order deeming the nondisclosure agreement she was given during her exit negotiations void is all she wants. She says she never signed it, which is the reason. She claims that the NDA in question has a fake signature on it. And when its contents were made public, they caused controversy outside of the legal community. According to reports, the agreement forbade Kuhn from talking about the Sterns’ “daily activities and personal habits,” which included their food preferences, sleeping patterns, hobbies, entertainment choices, hotel and restaurant selections, political affiliations, and “any other matters affecting or relating to the Company and its business, and the personal and business affairs of the Company.” Friends and family were covered. Almost everything was covered.

John Leonard, Kuhn’s lawyer, clearly stated the problem. He claimed that the NDA is biased because it permits the Sterns to openly discuss Kuhn while she is still subject to legal restrictions. He told reporters that the fundamental issue was that asymmetry. He proposed that a document that grants one party total freedom of speech while forbidding the other from defending herself is not an agreement. It’s a gag order disguised as a contract.

The Hollywood Reporter immediately drew a comparison to Robert De Niro’s former assistant. In that instance, an executive assistant with the impressive title of vice president of production and finance filed a lawsuit against De Niro for retaliation and gender discrimination after she was given household chores that allegedly included buttoning his shirts and cleaning his sheets. She received a $1.3 million award from a jury. Lawyers on both sides are undoubtedly aware of how the employment dynamics in that case—high-ranking title, domestic expectations, and power imbalance—echo the Kuhn complaint.

As this develops, it seems that the lawsuit is really about language and power: who gets to say what happened, under what circumstances, and to whom. Kuhn is not requesting cash. She is requesting permission to speak. Although the legal request is limited, the cultural space it encompasses is much larger. Since the larger discussion about power dynamics in the workplace has changed, NDAs in celebrity employment have come under closer scrutiny. Even in that context, a document that addresses sleeping patterns and dietary preferences is unusual. Whatever it was that Kuhn went through inside Oceanview is still unknown. The purpose of her lawsuit is to provide her with the legal authority to alter that.

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The made free throws marked the end of a night that had been quietly challenging for McKenney for the majority of it. He had shot 0-for-3 from three and 1-for-8 from the field going into those final seconds. The championship game was not going as planned for a player who had averaged 12 points per game during Michigan’s entire tournament run, scoring a tournament-high 17 against Alabama and 16 in a commanding semifinal victory over Arizona. UConn had a strong defense. He wasn’t looking bad. In one version of the story, everyone remembers that line: “1-for-8, off night, biggest stage of his career.”

Rather, people will replay what transpired with less than two minutes remaining. Connecticut is still within striking distance as Michigan continues to push for a transition. Roddy Gayle Jr. found McKenney on the wing while driving and attracting the defense. Just one dribble. The arc is two steps behind. Let go. Only the net. Practically speaking, the game was over when the building erupted. When asked if he knew it was going in, Gayle responded, “Absolutely,” later. “Trey has the most confidence I’ve ever seen as a freshman.”

That self-assurance is not a recent development. It existed at Orchard Lake St. Mary’s, where McKenney played for Coach Todd Covert for four years, amassing 1,970 career points, a 79-22 record, a Division I state championship in 2024, and three consecutive state semifinals. It was evident when he averaged 23.8 points, 10.2 rebounds, 3.0 assists, and 2.1 steals during his senior year. These stats may seem insignificant, but keep in mind that Michigan’s Mr. Basketball and Gatorade Player of the Year should look like that. It was evident in 2025 when he came off the bench at the Nike Hoop Summit and went 7-for-9 from the field to score 22 points against an international all-star team. First, there was the confidence. It was followed by praise.

After graduating from high school, he was ranked in the top 20 nationally by recruiting services, ranking 16th on On3, 18th on ESPN, and 19th on Rivals. Given that McKenney had always dreamed of playing at Ann Arbor, Michigan’s acquisition of him felt noteworthy. He truly is a local tale turned national. A child from Flint, Michigan, a city that has endured decades of infrastructure problems, economic hardship, and the unique burden of being undervalued, never seemed to bear any of that burden himself. Woodrow Stanley, his grandfather, served as Flint’s mayor. Linnell Jones McKenney, his aunt, is recognized as the first female professional basketball player in the city. Although there is a strong familial bond with the game, McKenney has never seemed to take it too seriously.

By his own historical standards, his freshman season at Michigan was statistically modest: he scored 9.9 points per game, pulled down 2.8 rebounds, and came off the bench for a team so deep that starting positions were earned gradually. However, the basketball internet insisted for a large portion of the season that having this specific player as a reserve was Michigan’s greatest luxury. One widely shared tweet said, “We’re going to look back one day and laugh at the fact that this team was so deep that they had Trey McKenney coming off the bench.” The sentiment was accurate.

Observing his tournament trajectory gives me the impression that the 2025–2026 season was actually just the first draft of this player’s future. His season-long shooting percentages of 46.2% from the field, 39.1% from three, and 89.5% from the free throw line highlight the efficiency argument that his size and wingspan (6’9″) support. He is “a unique backcourt matchup” whose “massive wingspan” and physical play style create defensive issues that most 19-year-old guards just don’t create, according to a widely circulated analyst note.

There are already draft projections available. the class of 2027. initial round. A potential lottery. McKenney hasn’t made any public comments about it other than to calmly confirm that he will be going back to Ann Arbor the following year. It will be interesting to see if that year turns out to be a springboard for the NBA or just another chapter in the Michigan narrative he has been crafting since childhood. In any case, Monday night’s shot—from a teenager who claimed it felt like practice, off a 1-for-8 shooting line, on the biggest stage in college basketball—is the kind of moment that is preserved in program lore while the player is still learning the rest.

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The majority of those who heard that interview believed he was mentally ill, confused, or lying. Some continue to do so. However, the narrative remained unchanged. Lazar has told the same story with the same technical specificity over the course of more than 35 years of media appearances, podcast interviews, and public scrutiny. He hasn’t changed, retracted, or added anything implausible to fill the void.

Consistency might be a sign of a man who made an early commitment to a fabrication and never broke. It might also show a man being honest. That question remains unanswered in the Luigi Vendittelli and Christopher Matteau-directed documentary S4: The Bob Lazar Story, which debuted on Amazon Prime Video on April 3, 2026. It does something different: it depicts precisely what Lazar said, rendered with a degree of visual accuracy never seen in any other account.

The film, which was directed by Vendittelli, started out as an attempt by a Canadian production company to create the most realistic visual reconstruction of the S4 facility and the craft Lazar worked on. The documentary’s most immediate contribution is the 3D recreations, which were created over years of design, research, and production. The hangar doors were built into a mountainside in the desert. Sitting on an elevated platform was the circular metallic craft. The reactor, which is the size of a basketball, uses a fuel that shouldn’t exist in theory to produce gravitational waves. All of this has been explained verbally and with crude diagrams in earlier documentaries. The visual fidelity with which S4 renders it eliminates the need for abstraction. You can see the instrumentation, the hatch, and the hallway. As usual, the documentary won’t address whether what you’re witnessing is accurate.

The film is narrated by Lazar, who appears on screen as a man who has lived with this story since before the majority of his current audience was born, carrying it in the same way that people carry something both heavy and irreplaceable. Here, too, is George Knapp, who broke the original story in Las Vegas in 1989 and has followed it throughout his career. One of Lazar’s closest friends, Gene Huff, has consistently corroborated over the years and was present at some of the events described. Bob’s wife, Joy Lazar, offers the kind of humanizing context that previous accounts mostly omitted. It serves as a reminder that behind the element-115 talks and the claims about the classified facility, there is someone who has also lived this, endured the threats, intimidation, and professional destruction, and persisted.

Lazar’s second appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, episode #2479, coincided with the release of the documentary. According to reports, Lazar and Rogan watched the movie together prior to the start of the podcast. With over 100 million views on YouTube, Lazar’s debut on the show is still the most watched episode ever, according to Rogan. Regardless of one’s opinion of its verifiability, that is an important piece of information regarding the public’s desire for this content. Within days of its release, the movie received a 7.7 on IMDb and a 95% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that it is doing well with those who attended.
It is not unreasonable for skeptics to claim that Lazar’s story is presented in the documentary without any significant opposition, that it is advocacy disguised as journalism and reconstruction disguised as proof. The willingness to accept Lazar at face value reveals more about the audience than the subject, according to a Rotten Tomatoes reviewer who bluntly pointed out that everything in the movie has been accessible on YouTube for years. There is some truth to that criticism. It’s obvious that the film was created by people who support Lazar and want others to do the same. Counterarguments are not given the same amount of time.

However, it’s difficult to ignore the documentary’s arrival at a specific cultural moment. Area 51, also known as Dreamland, was officially recognized by the US government in 2023. The nearby facility Lazar mentioned, S4, has never received recognition. Whistleblowers have testified, Congress has held hearings on UAPs, and the general denial that characterized official responses to this topic for fifty years has changed into something more ambiguous and awkward. The vocabulary and framework introduced by Bob Lazar in that 1989 interview in Las Vegas are directly responsible for much of what is being discussed in those congressional hearings. He gave the place a name. He gave the element a name. He explained the technology. Without him, the current discussion would not take place as it does, regardless of whether he is a reliable source or an incredibly tenacious liar.

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The rumor spread quickly, shapelessly, and self-reinforcingly, just like these things do these days. Claims that the airspace above Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, had been restricted and that nearby roads had been closed started to circulate on X. There was no official source that confirmed either claim. There was no supporting documentation for either. A press lid, a few days out of the public eye, unconfirmed reports close to the president’s primary medical facility, and a geopolitical situation so dire that any disruption to presidential continuity would matter greatly were all factors that, to some on social media, seemed to add up to something.

The war with Iran, which has dominated the news cycle and, apparently, the president’s work schedule in the days since, was the subject of Trump’s most recent public appearance on April 1st, when he gave a national address. Instead of going to Mar-a-Lago as he usually does, he stayed in Washington for Easter, which was viewed as evidence by those who were already suspicious. Some may have perceived the combination of high geopolitical tension and a president holed up in the White House as the kind of environment where unexpected things happen.

The White House had had enough by Saturday night. Steven Cheung, director of communications, posted a statement with a particularly friendly tone. “There has never been a President who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump,” he wrote. “He has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office this Easter weekend. God bless him. The White House’s Rapid Response 47 account on X retaliated more forcefully, calling the rumors the product of “deranged liberals” and pointing out—in a sharp analogy—that President Biden frequently went twelve days without speaking to the media and did not cause any comparable online panic.

In retrospect, the evidence for the White House’s version was fairly strong. At 1:50 PM on Saturday, CBS News producer Emma Nicholson took a picture of a Marine sentry stationed at the West Wing door, a customary sign that the president is inside and at work. Throughout Saturday, Trump made nine posts on Truth Social about a variety of subjects, including economic data, the Iran standoff, and his customary criticism of political rivals. He had made at least four more posts by Sunday afternoon. None of the photos or videos that were circulating online as purported evidence of a medical emergency were confirmed; in fact, a number of them were recycled footage from past incidents that had nothing to do with the current situation.

In all of this, there’s something worth stopping for, and it’s not totally comfortable to say. In part, the circumstances for uncertainty are real, which is why the rumor spread so swiftly. Trump is the oldest president of the United States in history. Following what Trump himself referred to as a “perfect” MRI, his doctor declared him to be in “exceptional” condition following his most recent official medical evaluation, which took place at Walter Reed in October 2025. However, the public’s demand for health transparency from a 79-year-old president overseeing a war is not inherently irrational. From Eisenhower’s heart attack while in office to the discussions surrounding Biden’s cognitive fitness that dominated the latter part of his presidency, the issue of presidential health has plagued American politics for generations.

The speed and form of the information environment have changed. Before any journalist has had time to make a single phone call, a press lid, a few hours of presidential silence, and a few unconfirmed social media posts can generate half a million searches and propel “Trump dead” into trending territory. The question seems to have been resolved for the time being by the White House’s response, which was fairly prompt and supported by visible evidence. There was no hospitalization. There was no confirmed medical emergency. According to all available accounts, the President was in the Oval Office, posting on social media, and presumably dealing with far more serious issues than a widely circulated rumor regarding his health.

Observing this from the outside, it’s difficult to avoid experiencing the peculiar dizziness of the current information moment, where the White House is making Easter weekend statements to reassure the public that the president is, in fact, alive and working, and the time between rumor and trending crisis has shrunk to just a few hours.

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Although the change has been developing for years, two relatively recent events contributed to its crystallization in a way that economists and regulators by themselves had not been able to. In 2015, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England at the time, gave a speech at Lloyd’s of London. Carney contended that in a world dedicated to keeping global warming to 2°C, fossil fuel companies might find themselves sitting on reserves that are, in his words, “literally unburnable.” The statement stuck because it was direct in a way that financial language seldom is. The second was Pacific Gas and Electric’s 2019 bankruptcy in California, which the Wall Street Journal called the first “climate-change bankruptcy.” It’s not a tale of financial mismanagement. Not a scandal involving derivatives. The physical realities of drought and wildfires, coupled with climate risk, caused a utility to collapse financially and legally.

The 2°C Financial Risk in Corporate Boardrooms: Key Facts

These were not hypothetical situations. These were actual occurrences, accompanied by share prices, court documents, and actual losses. And the way boardrooms viewed the discussion was altered by that tangibility and specificity.

What climate scenario analysis looks like in practice is less dramatic than either of those moments, but the implications run just as deep. Recently, a large food and beverage company working with PwC’s climate risk team needed to know how warming scenarios of 2°C and 4°C would impact the price of coffee and corn in its growing regions, as well as how carbon regulations might change the cost of plastic packaging. Physical mapping was the first step in the analysis, which used geospatial tools to forecast the frequency and intensity of climate hazards in particular agricultural regions. After that, it ran separate projections on how carbon pricing under the International Energy Agency’s net-zero pathway would affect plastics costs, used IPCC scenarios to model commodity price effects, and created a combined financial picture of the costs associated with various temperature outcomes across the company’s input supply chain. There was no qualitative warning as a result. The board could actually use the set of numbers.

When it released its recommendations in 2017, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures was established to standardize this type of work across markets and industries. The architects of the framework had anticipated faster progress. The majority of businesses that disclose climate risks still do so in qualitative terms, characterizing their exposure’s nature without estimating its financial impact. Most businesses have yet to bridge the substantial gap between recognizing that supply chains may be impacted by flood risk and actually modeling the implications for earnings per share in a 2°C world. The IMF has been clear about this since joining the Network for Greening the Financial System in the years after Carney’s speech: before comprehensive climate stress testing becomes significant at scale, data gaps must be filled and standardized disclosure must be promoted.

There is a methodological component to the problem. Historical data, which is the foundation of most financial modeling, doesn’t reliably describe a climate future that has no historical precedent. Models that are calibrated against historical drought cycles, flood patterns, and hurricane frequencies are using inputs that the climate is actively rendering outdated. Businesses that use carbon pricing scenarios to test their business models are essentially conducting stress tests in future markets shaped by ongoing technological transitions against regulatory environments that do not yet exist. The accuracy of any quantitative output is constrained by this actual uncertainty. However, as PG&E showed, the alternative—treating climate as a qualitative footnote while physical and transition risks compound—has its own costs.

As the investment landscape changes, there’s a sense that the financial community has moved past the argument over whether climate risk actually affects balance sheets to a messier, more pragmatic one about how to measure it accurately enough to take action. The market for green bonds increased from $78 billion in 2015 to about $590 billion by 2019. Depending on the methodology used, estimates of sustainable finance assets worldwide now range from $3 trillion to $31 trillion. Boards are starting to link senior executive pay to performance goals related to climate change. Both the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Commission have proposed disclosure regulations that would require quantitative scenario analysis as standard procedure. Even when the destination is still unknown, the direction of travel is obvious.

Whether corporate adaptation is occurring at the same rate as physical risk is still up for debate. According to OECD estimates, the infrastructure investment needed to manage the climate transition will cost about $6 trillion annually through 2030. That figure is nearly impossible to comprehend, but it represents the true scope of what must be reconstructed, rerouted, and funded if the 2°C scenario is to remain a scenario rather than a definitive result. A beginning is being made by the boardrooms using climate value at risk models. The models themselves, with their ranges, assumptions, and inherent uncertainties, can describe but cannot provide an answer to the question of whether that start is adequate.

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On the par-70 Memorial Park course, Woodland finished 21 under par with a final 67 to win the Texas Children’s Houston Open by five strokes. It was his fifth win on the PGA Tour. Additionally, it was his first since the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, which was seven years ago in a different life. Between those two victories were brain surgery, farewell letters to his wife and kids before he passed away, a recuperation that appeared to be a comeback but wasn’t quite, and a PTSD diagnosis he carried in secret for more than a year while continuing to tee it up every week, sobbing in scoring trailers and running to his car to collapse where no one could see him.
The area of his brain responsible for controlling fear had been compressed by the brain lesion. Before receiving a diagnosis, Woodland would wake up in the middle of the night, clutching his bed, believing he was going to die. He had no idea what was going on with him. In September 2023, the growth was finally removed by doctors using what Woodland later described as a baseball-sized hole in his skull. It was a success. The lesion had disappeared. However, the fear—a kind of lingering alarm that refused to go away—stayed with him and manifested as PTSD, which made everyday golf course moments seem nearly impossible. A walking scorer is approaching from behind. At the ninth tee, there are too many spectators. Unexpected triggers included blurry vision and immobile legs. He only managed to finish some rounds because his caddie, Brennan Little, told him where to aim when he was completely blind.

He kept it all to himself. He competed as best he could, showed up every week, and remained silent for over a year following the diagnosis. The golf community applauded his comeback and told him how wonderful it was to see him well. And in his own words, he felt like he was living a lie every time someone said that. He said, “Inside, I feel like I’m dying,” during a conversation he had personally sought out with Rex Hoggard of Golf Channel earlier this month. He described himself as being a thousand pounds lighter after entering that interview in tears.
The timing of what came next seems almost too perfect to be true, but it is. The week following the interview, a T14 at Valspar. Houston came next. 64, 63, 65, and 67 rounds. putting ahead of the field. At 41 years old, he ranks seventh in driving distance, averaging 321 yards off the tee, making him one of the longest hitters on a circuit with players half his age. Woodland was instructed months ago by his coach Randy Smith, who also works with world number one Scottie Scheffler, to stop guiding the ball, stop playing scared, and return to swinging like he used to. In essence, he had described him as soft. Woodland heard it, worked on it, and this week at Memorial Park the violence was back in his swing — the kind that made him a U.S. First of all, an open champion.
A detail from the final round fits this story perfectly even though it doesn’t belong in a sports narrative. On Sunday, Woodland wore custom shoes that were vibrant, colorful, and full of life. They were created in collaboration with Texas Children’s Hospital and were influenced by the artwork of a young patient named Ceci, who has been fighting a brain tumor for seven years. On the side of those shoes was the word “courage.” The word didn’t feel like marketing when you saw him walk those last fairways in them, knew the week he’d had, and realized how much the past two and a half years had cost him and his family. It felt well-deserved.
Nicolai Hojgaard and Min Woo Lee, Woodland’s playing partners, purposefully held back and let him walk alone as the crowd erupted after the final putt. Afterwards, Hojgaard stated that they believed it was the right decision. Standing twenty-five yards behind, Lee gestured for the gallery to raise their volume with both hands. At that moment, the two men who came in second and third wanted nothing more than for the man who outperformed them to have his full, uninterrupted moment.
In two weeks, Woodland will arrive at Augusta. His long run at the Masters came to an end last year when he failed to qualify. He believes that his current game is the best it has ever been. However, he made it apparent following the victory that Sunday was not the end. A trophy doesn’t make PTSD go away. On Friday’s back nine, there was still a moment when the crowd was too close, causing him to become hypervigilant once more. His personal security had to calm him down before he could gather himself and carry on. Nothing was cured by the victory. It simply demonstrated something. He continues to struggle, heal, and learn how to cope with something that doesn’t show up on a leaderboard.With his arms encircling Gabby and tears streaming down his face, he declared, “I wasn’t going to let this thing in my head win.” “Today was evidence of that.”

The post “Inside, I Feel Like I’m Dying” — Gary Woodland’s Win Is the Most Emotional Story in Golf Right Now appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

However, there’s a sense that something is being concealed. Despite having eighteen tracks, the album feels condensed. “Punch Drunk,” co-produced by Ye’s daughter North West and a true highlight, is less than two minutes long and ends just as it’s gaining traction. “Whatever Works,” “Sisters and Brothers,” and “White Lines” all have the beginnings of great things, but they all fall short. This tension was aptly captured in the Reddit hiphopheads thread that surfaced within hours of the album’s release: one commenter described it as “fleshed out demos,” while another wrote that it’s “the first time in years I’ve wanted more.” Both statements are true and do not negate one another.
The lyrical question is more difficult. Objectively speaking, over the last four years, Kanye West has had more to rap about than nearly any other living artist. The antisemitic remarks, the Wall Street Journal apologies, the meetings with rabbis, the unpredictable behavior, the full-page advertisements, the cultural alienation, the slow retreat—it’s the kind of content that could support an album’s worth of sincere, introspective music. Instead, Bully makes a more indirect offer. In “Sisters and Brothers,” he refers to money as “the root of all evil” and admits that people think he’s “blacking out like Akon”—a significant departure from the billionaire chest-thumping of previous years. He permits himself to use the line “Life gave me lemons, made an Arnold Palmer on the rocks” on “Whatever Works,” describing it as an overview of the past few years. He sounds truly content on “Mama’s Favorite,” which ends with an archival exchange between a young Kanye and his mother Donda that justifies the song’s sentiment. These are authentic moments. However, they are surrounded by songs where the rapping sounds like “sentence fragments” from someone who used to write in paragraphs, according to a Reddit commenter.
His best album in ten years, according to the Hotpress review, which rated it an eight out of ten. According to Soul In Stereo, it has “not much bark or bite.” They rated it a 3 out of 5. “All the Love” was at the top of Billboard’s track ranking. The Reddit consensus gave it a score of about a 6 or 7 out of 10, with sincere appreciation for the first half and perplexity for the second. As befits the man, the reaction is as polarized as he has always been.
Following the release, Kanye will perform in two stadium shows in the United States for the first time in almost five years at SoFi Stadium on April 1 and April 3. Bully may be less of a completed artistic statement and more of a reset, a sign that the music is making a comeback to a place worth listening to, even though it hasn’t quite reached that point yet. Ye may still have the ear, according to the production. Bullies simply make you want to hear what they’re going to do when they have a little more time and a lot more to say, which is kind of painful.

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In a sense, the idea is quite clever. Doug (Black), a wedding videographer who once aspired to be a real director, gathers his three closest friends, Griff (Rudd), a struggling actor whose career high point is a four-episode arc on a procedural drama; Kenny (Steve Zahn), a cameraman; and Claire (Thandiwe Newton), an actor, to go to the Amazon and create a spiritual sequel to Anaconda, the 1997 creature feature that they all adored as kids. The original was a bad movie, starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, and Jon Voight in an accent that is still one of the biggest mysteries in movies. However, it was the kind of movie that stuck in the minds of a certain generation, leading to four progressively worse sequels, a Chinese remake, and finally this 2025 meta-reboot that made $135 million at the box office worldwide before creeping onto Netflix.

It’s possible that the box office figure reveals more about Black and Rudd’s popularity together than it does about the film itself. Whatever happens, these two will be entertaining to watch because of their unique charisma, which serves as a social contract with the audience. For the most part, that contract is valid. Even though Rudd’s deadpan is a little older and possibly more self-deprecating than it was when he was Ant-Man, it still makes sense. Black continues to put forth a level of physical effort that would be taxing for most actors half his age. The script alludes to something genuine about middle age and unfulfilled dreams, but it doesn’t quite commit to it. They play friends who have known each other too long to be completely honest.
When the snake finally appears in its entirety, it is big enough to swallow a man whole, which is the only metric that matters to the film. Decider’s critic pointed out that the CGI is superior to the rubber-and-practical-effect serpent from 1997. That’s a low bar, and it was cleared with no fanfare. The actual horror scenes are skillful but not particularly memorable. The lighthearted moments are not offensive. The same critic noted that everything goes “squish in an unmemorable fashion.” A deep cut by Mötley Crüe serves as the soundtrack for a car chase. The movie drops a twist after a character says that every good movie needs one. The film is conscious that it is a film. That awareness is often the only joke in the room and can be endearing at times.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the movie feels most at ease when Black and Rudd are simply conversing, whether it’s in the Buffalo backyard during the birthday party scene or on the boat floating down a river whose name the film doesn’t bother to establish. Plot scaffolding is not necessary for their chemistry. It requires dialogue, which is sporadically included in the script. The script doesn’t bother to acknowledge that Thandiwe Newton, who has done genuinely intriguing work in movies like Westworld and Passing, is given virtually nothing to do here.
Depending on your level of tolerance for the idea, the meta-comedy angle—a movie about making a bad movie that is also a movie—falls somewhere between inspiring and draining. Because Cage’s character is genuinely bizarre enough to support the joke, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was successful. Because the joke ultimately focuses on how awful the 1997 Anaconda was—a more specific and well-known target—Anaconda performs less well. There is a real audience for which that 1997 movie is a treasured relic of poor taste, but it might not be big enough to sustain the idea for ninety minutes without further assistance.
And yet. Reaching the top spot on Netflix within a few days of its streaming debut, creating the kind of casual goodwill that turns movies into late-night favorites and background watches, and finding an audience willing to put up with mediocrity in order to still have fun—perhaps that’s enough. Paul Rudd and Jack Black pursued a snake in the jungle. The snake was enormous. Exactly, nobody got what they came for. However, there were enough attendees that it must have been effective.

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Reference Links: 2026 MLB Official Schedule — MLB.com 2026 MLB Opening Day Schedule & Scores — USA Today

Observing how the league has organized this first week gives the impression that MLB has genuinely decided to compete for casual attention in a manner that it hasn’t always bothered to do. The Yankees and Giants, a Netflix exclusive, kicked off the schedule. Over the next few days, it spread to NBC, Peacock, Apple TV, Fox, and MLB. Everything else is carried by TV. It’s a streaming strategy that no other major sport has quite tried on this scale for a single week, and it’s possible that this will become the standard moving forward or that it will divide the audience in ways that annoy the devoted fan base. However, it’s not a bad idea to place Opening Night on the world’s most popular streaming service. New York’s Max Fried was on the mound, and Tony Vitello, the Giants’ new manager after a successful stint at Tennessee, was recording his first game as a professional manager. These are not fleeting moments.
The Tigers arrived at Petco Park in Detroit with what may be the most explicit World Series mandate of any baseball team. On the first day of spring training, manager A.J. Hinch informed his players that the mountain was ahead of them before closing camp and stating that October is the only month that matters. Tarik Skubal, the two-time AL Cy Young winner who will be eligible for free agency after this season with a salary of about $400 million, is the vehicle for that goal. He looked the part on Thursday. Detroit defeated San Diego 8-2 at Petco with six scoreless innings, six strikeouts, and zero earned runs. In a five-run first inning, Kevin McGonigle, baseball’s consensus No. 2 prospect going into the season, turned on the first pitch he saw in a major league game and ripped a two-run double off Nick Pivetta. His career got off to a quick start. For years, highlight shows replay this type of debut moment.
The Dodgers won their first game with typical ease because they are the Dodgers. In the seventh inning, Will Smith hit a two-run home run to complete an 8-2 victory over Arizona, and Kyle Tucker, who is new to Los Angeles and is still figuring out his celebration routine after reaching base, lined a double to right to score Shohei Ohtani. With the exception of Freddie Freeman, every starter in the lineup had a hit; this is the kind of insignificant detail that is recorded in a box score and then forgotten by April. It’s more difficult to forget that this team has the most stacked roster in baseball with Ohtani, Tucker, Betts, and Yamamoto, and they’re already acting as though October is more of a formality than a destination.
In Cleveland, the Guardians defeated Seattle 6-4 after Chase DeLauter hit two home runs in his first major league regular season game, including a 422-foot shot to center in the ninth inning that proved to be the game-winning strike. Jacob Misiorowski struck out 11 to set a Brewers Opening Day record in Milwaukee, capping a 14-2 thrashing of the White Sox. By the time the game was decisively decided, it had begun to feel more like a statement than an opener after Milwaukee’s William Contreras cleared the bases with a double in a four-run second inning.
From this point on, each team’s schedule consists of 162 games through the end of September, with the postseason structure continuing into October. It’s difficult not to feel that this particular season has its own unique texture after witnessing everything in just one opening week: the rookies, the veterans, the managers with things to prove, and the pitchers who didn’t quite make it through the first inning. Jackson Chourio, who lost the World Baseball Classic before the regular season even started, is already on the injured list due to a fractured hand. The Mets appear to be a real threat. In October, Detroit’s championship-or-bust mentality usually results in either rings or lengthy discussions about what went wrong. Despite spending the majority of his later years dealing with injuries, Mike Trout continues to be outstanding, setting a franchise record with his fifth career Opening Day home run for the Angels.

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