Serena williams

Saturday

Gage Klipper

Don’t let Serena bully you into taking the fat shot

Serena Williams is one of the world’s greatest living athletes, but in her retirement, she seems to have forgotten the basics of diet and exercise. You’ve likely seen Williams’ ad campaign for Ro, a telehealth provider that specializes in GLP-1 weight loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound. In the now ubiquitous commercials, Williams tells how she personally used the drug to burn stubborn postpartum fat, a respectable 31 pounds over 8 months.“It’s not a short cut, it’s science,” reads the company’s tagline. Williams looks great – of course, of course. But just because scientists have discovered a cure for fatness doesn’t mean she still hasn’t taken the easy way out.

Serena Williams

Friday

Roger Alton

The Super Bowl spectacle is marketing genius

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic lawmaker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: "Fly me to New Orleans." Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of "America the Beautiful" and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of "faith, family and football"?

Super Bowl

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Trump scores feminist victory with trans sports Executive Order

File this under sentences that shouldn’t have to be written, but President Donald Trump just signed an executive order barring biological males from participating in women’s sports. The Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports order, reports ESPN, “gives federal agencies, including the Justice and Education departments, wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the Trump administration's view, which interprets ‘sex’ as the gender someone was assigned at birth.” The move seems like a no-brainer, and most Americans will likely roll their eyes, turn on the Super Bowl this weekend to watch the most testosteroned of muscley, macho men bash each other to the ground and not give the chromosomes a second thought.

women's sports

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Vince Vaughn on why Hollywood doesn’t make comedies

One of the great comedic actors of our time, Vince Vaughn, appeared on the most recent episode of Hot Ones, an interview program in which celebrities answer questions about their lives and careers while eating progressively spicier wings. I highly recommend watching the full episode because Vaughn is incredibly charming, funny and way more intelligent than he gets credit for. One question really caught my attention. The host, Sean Evans, asked Vaughn, “There’s been endless ink spilled about Hollywood no longer making the R-rated, wide-release theatrical comedies that were such a tower of strength in your career. How have you seen Hollywood’s interest in making those kinds of films change over the course of your career and what do you think are the forces at play?

Friday

Taki

The Oprah-fication of Wimbledon

Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 — the year of the boycott — is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was fifty at the time, while Pam was seventeen, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it was legal. The age of consent varies from place to place, and the only time I had to defend myself was when an irate father, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter I had dated, rang me early in the morning and complained about me being seventy-two. “There is no age limit as far as being too old,” I told him. He rudely hung up on me. But before I go on about Pam Shriver and her oldie coach, a few comments are in order about how Oprah has taken over tennis and even Wimbledon.

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

The trans debate shows we’re all supremacists

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Monday

Alex Perez

Serve and volley

Richard Williams, the mercurial father of the tennis superstars Venus and Serena, is the subject of the wonderful new biopic King Richard, starring Will Smith in an Oscar-worthy performance. Williams is a fascinating figure who, as longtime tennis fans know, planned out the careers of his daughters before they were even born, telling anyone who’d listen that the Compton-bred girls were destined for superstardom. It was a preposterous statement, all the more so since it was made by a man who knew next to nothing about tennis. Yet as we now know, Williams’s vision became reality.

Richard