Barry Petchesky

The Carolina Hurricanes are worthy NHL champs, plowing through the playoffs with a 16-3 record. It's a victory of commitment to an approach, as head coach Rod Brind'Amour's system finally paid ultimate dividends after seven years of postseason exits. It's a victory for bloggers everywhere, thanks to the employment of GM Eric Tulsky and analyst Tyler Dellow(!). But most important, it's a victory for family. The Dundon family, specifically. No other families.

Norway's charmed and charming run to the World Cup quarterfinals has been a good time all around. Erling Haaland is probably the most lovingly memed man on Earth at the moment, and with good reason . The Norwegians are getting really into cowboy fashion. It's all very fun. They seem like a fun hang. And they are rowing. They are rowing after wins. They are rowing in Times Square . They are rowing up the escalator.

On Monday the visiting Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers by a score of something to something. This is not important. What is important is that there was a squirrel.

The last real star in the universe will be a red dwarf. This will not be for some time yet. The conditions are ripe for stars to be formed, to live out their lives, to burn out or explode, in cycles for the next 100 trillion years. The universe is, then, unimaginably

They don't give style points in baseball, but if you were scoring Orioles-Rockies, you'd want to break out a second, third, maybe even a fourth color of pen to decorate the box with Colton Cowser's ninth-inning catch to save the game for Baltimore. Maybe some tempera as well. You can't make that "F8" pretty enough.

On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two larger bodies are in equilibrium. It's a comfy place to be for a space telescope; Roman can say hi to her old classmate Webb, who got there four years ago and has been sending back

We can officially stick a fork in the fallout stage of former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini's long and handholdy relationship with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. Russini resigned in disgrace and remains unemployed, while Vrabel suffered absolutely no professional consequences. And now The Athletic has completed its five-month review to determine whether her work was up to the company's ethical standards. Spoiler alert: It was mostly fine.

Did you forget about the Yankees? I know you did not because you are not allowed to. But New York has had a relatively quiet season by their flamboyant and national-TV-darling standards. A big part of this is that the AL East has looked pretty much the same for a while now: The Rays have maintained a comfortable but not secure division lead; the less said about what's happening down there with the bird teams, the better; and in the middle, the Red Sox have

Go ahead and listen to this . (For the real perverts, use this one ; you just know you're about to stay up until 1:00 a.m. for a particularly shitty Sharks–Mighty Ducks game.) What does it evoke? What do you think of? More specifically, who do you think of? You immediately know you're about to spend some time with Barry Melrose, the formative face—and hair—of an entire generation of American hockey fans.

It was supposed to be a day to remember Chris Johnson, and it still can be. The NFL's all-time single-season yards leader was scheduled to be honored today by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he starred from 2008–2013, at halftime of their game against the New York Jets, for whom he played in 2014. But the Titans