After Biden's diagnosis, Jake Tapper's book tour is business as usual
'You guys want me to sing, right?' quipped CNN's Jake Tapper, as he and his co-author Alex Thompson, of Axios, settled into their seats onstage.
It was an unusually rock-and-roll setting for a book talk: 9:30 Club is one of Washington's most storied music halls, with a capacity of 1,200 standing. (This event was seated; as of that morning, Politics and Prose Bookstore had sold a little over 300 tickets, priced at $45.30 each — hardcover not included.) The previous night, the club had hosted a singer-songwriter lab-engineered for Spotify's coffeehouse playlists; the next night, the rows of folding chairs would make way for a sapphic dance party, benefiting a reproductive access fund. All three of the venue's bars were open on this Thursday evening, requiring the P&P crowd — silvering, affluent, graciously suppressing irritation — to be carded at the door.
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New York Times
33 minutes ago
- New York Times
Edmonton avoids a painful repeat, and Texas stuns Texas Tech late
The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic's daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! Refuse that intentional walk today. We can quibble with quantitative analyses and details later. But watching Game 1 of both the Stanley Cup Final and the Women's College World Series championship last night left me with the best eye test result you can hope for in these situations: It feels like the two best teams are playing each other at the end. Advertisement Truly a wonderful thing. No flukes. Best-on-best, and last night's winners were decided on singular moments: We must start with a scintillating hockey game in Edmonton, where the Oilers — losers of last year's Stanley Cup Final against this same Panthers team — took a 1-0 series lead with a 4-3 overtime win. Florida was up 3-1 early in the second in this one, too. Here's the game winner from Leon Draisaitl with just 31 seconds left in the overtime period: LEON DRAISAITL IS EDMONTON'S HERO 🔥 The Oilers rally back from a 3-1 deficit to take Game 1 in OT! 🎥 @Sportsnet — The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 5, 2025 Avoid a 3-0 deficit this year? ✅ On the diamond, we saw an intentional walk gone awry win the game for Texas. It was wild. Texas Tech, fueled by star pitcher NiJaree Canady, had a 1-0 lead in the sixth inning when the Red Raiders decided to give Reese Atwood a free bag with two runners on base. The problem was that Atwood refused the offer: After review, this pitch was obstructed by @atwood_reese bat. #HookEm | 📺: ESPN — Texas Softball (@TexasSoftball) June 5, 2025 That was essentially the game. Longhorns up 1-0 in the series. Let's keep moving: Just a few weeks ago, Loïs Boisson was mostly known for a deodorant incident. Boisson, the 22-year-old French tennis revelation, began this year's French Open ranked No. 361 in the world. 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Two former Hoosiers, Haris Mujezinovic and Charlie Miller, filed suit in October against the university and head trainer Tim Garl, alleging both had knowledge of Bomba's actions and the school 'acted with deliberate indifference' toward his behavior. Two other players joined the suit in April, and yesterday an attorney told The Athletic at least 10 more players plan to come forward. Bomba died in May, and some players have said legendary Hoosiers coach Bob Knight was aware of Bomba's alleged impropriety. More details in our full report. Advertisement Manfred regrets ESPN opt-out The messy breakup between MLB and ESPN has moved past the anger stage and into nostalgia, as commissioner Rob Manfred said yesterday he regrets the move. Sources told The Athletic's Evan Drellich and Andrew Marchand that the league is in negotiations with multiple networks over the rights ESPN once had, and the packages are nowhere near the value of ESPN's offering. Manfred hopes to have a rights deal finalized soon. See his full comments. More news 📫 Love The Pulse? Check out our other newsletters. 📺 French Open: Women's Semifinals 9 a.m. ET on TNT/Max If you're able, throw this on this morning. First up is top-seeded Aryna Sabalenka against Iga Świątek for a spot in the final. Boisson-Coco Gauff follows. Both should be great. 📺 WCWS: Texas vs. Texas Tech, Game 2 8 p.m. ET on ESPN Texas can win its first title here. Easy call to watch. 📺 NBA: Pacers at Thunder 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC Finally, after nearly a week of waiting, the finals are here. We've talked about it plenty. I expect this game to be fast — Indiana's pace-driven offense against Oklahoma City's swarming defense that gorges on fast-break points. As Zach Harper said yesterday, the basketball itself will be good. Get tickets to games like these here. For all of the angles in this NBA Finals, I think it comes down to one guy: Tyrese Haliburton. 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New York Times
33 minutes ago
- New York Times
Thousands of Club World Cup tickets unsold, Brailsford steps back, Ronaldo's Portugal winner
The Athletic FC ⚽ is The Athletic's daily football (or soccer, if you prefer) newsletter. Sign up to receive it directly to your inbox. Hello! It's almost Club World Cup time. Don't all rush at once. ✂️ More CWC ticket price cuts 🚶 Brailsford steps aside at Man Utd 💰 £55m bid for Bryan Mbeumo 🏎️ Leeds Utd race Red Bull F1 The Athletic's Felipe Cardenas has an interview today with Mattias Grafstrom. I don't imagine the name will immediately ring a bell, but it's worth remembering. Grafstrom, a Swede, is FIFA's secretary general, with more than a little power. He was once chief of staff for its president, Gianni Infantino. Advertisement He's also the man who redesigned FIFA's Club World Cup (CWC), creating the 32-team tournament which starts in the United States next week. It was interesting to see him tell Felipe that the CWC was 'not a commercial venture as such'. From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem to be anything else. DAZN, for instance, paid $1billion for broadcast rights (which no other outlet wanted at that price — but let's not get bogged down in that). The 2025 winners will earn $125m, a Champions League-esque fee for considerably less effort. Grafstrom says FIFA is trying to grow the sport but, fundamentally, it's taken big money for some of the teams involved to give the competition their full attention. Unfortunately for FIFA, the paying public aren't rushing to buy into it. Adam Crafton reports that the opening match, between Inter Miami and Egyptian team Al Ahly in Miami on June 14, is struggling to sell out. The game, likely to feature Lionel Messi (above), is nowhere near capacity, so ticket prices are being cut. Is a late rush coming? Or is the model created by Grafstom failing to land? FIFA is running a dynamic pricing model for the 2025 CWC. In essence, the cost of tickets is dictated by demand: the more popular a fixture, the more it costs to attend. 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It makes all the right noises, FIFA, but how much is it telling itself what it wants to hear? Sir Dave Brailsford is widely known as Mr Marginal Gains. In the days when he ran Team Sky, before trouble enveloped them, the cycling outfit were the Tour de France's tour de force. The 61-year-old is a key figure at INEOS, Manchester United's minority shareholder, so it stood to reason that when INEOS took a stake in United in 2023, Brailsford would bring his competitive mind to Old Trafford. He did — but yesterday it emerged that he's stepping back again. In INEOS' 18 months, United haven't made marginal gains. They haven't made large gains either. Brailsford has been in the thick of everything that's gone on — a period of on-field regression and deep financial cuts — and his return to the role of INEOS' director of sport can be taken as an admission that his input hasn't worked. At all. 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But far from keeping its head down in Leeds, the energy drink giant — a minority partner — has its branding on the club's kit and its 2011 F1 car on their pitch. There's no missing the collaboration. Leeds' chairman, Paraag Marathe, said at the outset that a majority sale to Red Bull was not on the table. Perhaps that holds true. But I'm constantly fascinated to see if and how its interest evolves, in a league it is yet to crack. (Selected games, times ET/UK) UEFA Nations League semi-final: Spain vs France, 3pm/8pm — Fox Sports, Fubo/Amazon Prime. CONMEBOL World Cup qualifiers: Ecuador vs Brazil, 7pm/12am — Fanatiz PPV/Premier Sports; Paraguay vs Uruguay, 7pm/12pm — Fanatiz PPV (U.S. only); Chile vs Argentina, 9pm/2am — Fanatiz PPV (U.S. only). Virtually nobody on England's side of the Irish Sea would have registered the quiet, five-figure trade between Liverpool and Ringmahon Rangers in 2015. It moved a teenage Caoimhin Kelleher from Ireland to Anfield, long before the goalkeeper's name meant anything to the wider world. Ringmahon's secretary, Sean Fitzgerald, had the presence of mind to sweeten the deal with a 20 per cent sell-on clause. A decade on, and as a knock-on effect of Kelleher's £12.5m transfer from Liverpool to Brentford on Tuesday, it's about to pay out in the grassroots club's favour. The precise amount is yet to be calculated — but Fitzgerald isn't far wrong when he says the windfall should protect Ringmahon for 100 years. Safe hands all round.
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Democrats can't just meet the moment. They have to want it.
In the last few days, Democrats were gifted two moments that crystallized massive vulnerabilities for the GOP. Their response showed they still don't know how to use them to their advantage. First, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa dismissed concerns from her constituents at a town hall that proposed Medicaid cuts could cause people to lose eligibility and even die. 'Well, we are all going to die,' she said blithely. Then, video emerged of Department of Homeland Security police handcuffing one of Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler's aides in his Manhattan office, which is in the same building as an immigration courthouse. Both moments shorthanded a broader concern: Ernst's blunt words revealed the indifference of congressional Republicans to the suffering their spending cuts will cause, while the handcuffing was an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump administration's manhandling of the Constitution. These are the kinds of moments that break through, spilling over from the Beltway to the barbershop, the normally nonpolitical spaces where elections are won or lost. But when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., addressed how the party will hold the Trump administration accountable for the needless intrusion of law enforcement into a congressional office, he said on CNN's 'State of the Union': 'We will make that decision in a time, place and manner of our choosing.' With remarks like that, he might as well send a Hallmark card asking President Donald Trump politely to stop. Comments like this are partly to blame for why many feel elected Democrats in Washington don't have their finger on the pulse of their constituents. And if folks don't feel it, they don't believe it. What we need instead is a sustained campaign-like drumbeat from the opposition. Not once a month. Not after a crisis has passed. Daily. For the record, Jeffries later pivoted from his lukewarm nonresponse about Nadler to telling NBC News on Tuesday: 'We are in a 'more is more' environment. These aren't ordinary times, and they require an extraordinary response. House Democrats are rising to the occasion to meet the moment.' Democrats in Washington, please take note: 'More is more' is a key philosophy of the party's statewide and local efforts, and it has been working. While some in Washington are stuck in what I can only describe as a never-ending paper statement loop, the real leadership in the Democratic Party is happening elsewhere — in statehouses, community halls and movement spaces across this country. And it's long past time we give credit where it's due. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the national group focused on electing Democrats to state legislatures, just launched an initiative called State of Play. Through this series, it's giving the mic to local leaders — state senators, delegates and representatives — to talk about how the chaos in D.C. is landing in their communities. Some of these folks are in the minority in red states, but they're still pushing, still fighting. This is what showing up looks like. Let's also remember: We aren't coming off a losing cycle in states throughout the country. Vice President Kamala Harris didn't win Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada or Arizona, but Democratic Senate candidates in each of those battlegrounds emerged victorious. They notched major wins in legislatures. More recently, Keishan Scott has defeated his Republican rival in a landslide win for a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives — it was a massive overperformance. Democrat John Ewing won the Omaha, Nebraska, mayoral race against three-term Republican incumbent Jean Stothert. In April, Susan Crawford won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, allowing liberals to maintain their narrow majority on the battleground state's highest court — and defying Elon Musk after he spent millions of dollars to oppose her. These victories weren't a fluke — they were earned through organizing, persistence and community trust. And the organizing continues. The State of the People power tour — backed by grassroots activists and community organizers who have consistently been in the trenches — is making its way across the country from Jackson, Mississippi, to Los Angeles. They're not waiting for the next election. They're doing the work. Similarly, the Rev. William Barber II stood outside the Capitol on Monday, calling out the cruelty of the Republican budget and fighting for the poor and the working-class. But not one elected Democrat came outside to stand beside him. That moment mattered. Because as one of my mentors reminded me this week: 'You can't just be ready to meet the moment — you have to want the moment.' Too many Democrats, especially in Washington, seem to be waiting to be called off the bench. But this isn't a scrimmage. You either show up — visibly, consistently — or you forfeit the game. For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch 'The Weeknight' every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC. This article was originally published on
