TITO JE OVAJ SRPSKI GRAD ODUVEK MRZEO: Jedino mesto u Jugoslaviji koje je uvek izbegavao a neplanirano u njemu bio čak 7 puta

Eighty-four million Americans had a mental disorder in 2022, while 34 million people had a substance use disorder. About 11 million people dealt with both, but many did not receive professional treatment, partially because of a persistent stigma leading to silence and shame around mental health problems. Michelle Miller reports on how former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy and author Stephen Fried are hoping to make change with their new book.

Hizzoner just met hizzoliness.

"I thought for a second that I might be able to get out, but then when the lock was jammed, he had gotten over to me," recalled Julia Fatum, who wants better protections for emergency responders.

When he played for the Knicks, John Starks was known for his endless energy. But these playoffs have made him dog tired.

Sean "Diddy" Combs is asking a judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that he and two other men raped a 17-year-old girl in a New York recording studio in 2003.

Christopher Gilbert and about 10 friends were hanging out and drinking at Rhett's Tails and Shells last month when his buddy and co-worker, Cassidy Holland, pushed him into the water as a joke, he said.

Mother's Day brunch is upgraded with this deliciously tasty Eggs Benedict that's made with tender prime rib. Impress any mom by whipping up this delectable meal for breakfast or brunch.

Since the summer of 2020, dozens of schools in the nation named for Confederate leaders have changed their names, but this week, a Virginia school district has become likely the first in the nation to reverse course. The Shenandoah County school board overwhelmingly voted to restore the names of Confederate leaders to a high school and an elementary school.

Early voting is underway this morning in Maryland for a primary election for a seat in the U.S. House. U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn — who became a national figure after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — is on the ballot, and today's election could be an early test of what kind of candidate voters are looking for in 2024.

North Korea in recent months has maintained an accelerated pace in weapons testing as it expands its military capabilities while diplomacy with the United States and South Korea remains stalled.

"The little guy doesn't usually have access to people with my particular set of skills. But that's all about to change," Cohen says into the camera.

"He's always gotten along with Ava. They've been buddies since birth," the owner told Newsweek.

Former President Donald Trump will return to a New York City courtroom on Monday for his ongoing criminal hush money trial. His former attorney and one-time fixer Michael Cohen, a key witness for the prosecution, is expected to take the stand days after adult film star Stormy Daniels testified.

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A security camera in a Brooklyn elevator caught a delivery driver plucking off toppings from a Papa John's pie as he rode up to the customer's apartment.

The 19-word mantra emanates a quiet optimism, one that had carried me through some of the darkest times when I needed my mother’s love or support the most.

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A grassroots group of parents in Los Angeles is pushing back against the city's activist groups and school district who want to keep police officers out of schools.

Explore the Venice art scene and see all the other culture happenings in LA this week

GM reaffirms support for Andretti's F1 bid for 2025 or 2026.

One of the nation's largest health systems has paused some operations due to a cyberattack. Here's what goes on behind the scenes after a breach.

"His version of relaxation has always astonished me," Sarah Hau told Newsweek.

Cassandra Peterson, Sarah Silverman, and John Mulaney at John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA for the Netflix is a Joke Festival at the Sunset Gower Studios on May 8, 2024, in Los Angeles, CA. | Ryan West/Netflix Everybody’s in LA’s week-long stint is over. It still might point toward the streamer’s future — and the comedian’s. John Mulaney’s new, just-concluded Netflix comedy limited series, Everybody’s in LA, felt experimental in a number of ways. It’s not only Netflix trying out an interesting format — the show debuted live on May 3 and played out over the past week in a series of six nightly live episodes — but it also feels like Mulaney soft-launching a side gig. As the host to a motley crew of Los Angeles natives and town-invading comedians, Mulaney seems to be testing the waters for what kind of comedy his audience wants from him now. His 2023 confessional special Baby J won an Emmy for outstanding writing and delved into his recent struggles with sobriety, but it brought mixed reviews from critics — some of whom seemed skeptical at best that Mulaney had done enough to bare his soul for the rest of us. After a rough few years for Mulaney, such cynicism about the comedian seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. In particular, 2021 saw him enter rehab for drug addiction. Shortly after his release, it became clear that Mulaney had chosen to end his marriage to his then-wife of six years, Anna Marie Tendler, and begun a relationship with actor Olivia Munn — the timeline of which has been described as “tight.” No sooner had Mulaney filed for divorce than rumors of an affair leaked, followed by news that Munn was pregnant. The scandal hit the public unusually hard in a pandemic-era culture that clung to its heroes, and Mulaney’s transgressions spawned both intense backlash and intense discourse about whether our parasocial relationships have gotten too warped. The period severely damaged Mulaney’s relationship with his core audience, once full of people who responded to his idealistic charm. Those folks didn’t seem to move on easily — not even by April 2023, when Mulaney, through Baby J, proffered a way forward via the more traditional route: a redemptive confessional. Jump ahead to May 2024, and perhaps, if attempt one didn’t totally set a clear path forward for the comic, attempt two will: enter, an intentionally random daily comedy talk show built around the threadbarest of excuses. The show’s raison d’être: LA is weird. The solution: gather an unexpected bunch of funny people and locals together to talk about how weird LA is. The host: a comedian famed for his own likable random weirdness. Mulaney seems to be covering his bases. “We are only doing six episodes,” he explains in the introduction to Everybody’s in LA, “so the show will never hit its groove.” If this flops, it’s fine. Mulaney jokes that he doesn’t know why he’s doing the show, which functions as a side event for Netflix’s elaborate LA comedy festival, Netflix Is a Joke. “I need structure,” he says, a non-justification that also doubles as a subtle reminder for some viewers that we’re looking at a person who has a history of addiction and is presumably in recovery. That’s about as deep as this show gets, however; though we do get some gestures to sociocultural topics like environmentalism and the incessant problem of LA traffic, they’re handed to us in the guise of, for example, a coyote wrangler or a gonzo helicopter journalist. Mulaney features famous comedians, yes, but also everyone from hypnotherapists to former OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark. (And really, what could be more LA than that?) In between conversations, Mulaney features pretaped sketches from more guest comedians and Daily Show-style comedy correspondents. As if that’s not chaotic enough, he also has call-in guests. At one point during episode five, a seismologist sits quietly by while a caller recounts being awakened by an earthquake while sleeping in the nude. These probably aren’t the talk show beats you’re used to. Mulaney’s one-week fling with the city also works out well for Netflix. Despite trying on and off for years to make Netflix talk shows a thing, and despite intermittently bringing David Letterman back to do one-off long-form interviews, the platform has never nailed the format before this. The nightly show seems to be making a small impact; it’s currently hanging around at No. 10 on the Netflix US Top 10 shows for the day, and it’s moved up and down the chart for most of the week. Not a bad beginning; the beginning of what, exactly, remains somewhat unclear. Netflix could also be using this show as a pilot entry for similar themed efforts from other temporary hosts — in other words, more appointment TV. It certainly seems that the entire week, beginning with Katt Williams’s live standup special Woke Foke and the jarringly uncomfortable Roast of Tom Brady, was an experimental make-or-break week for Netflix and live programming. Or perhaps Netflix will do this again next year during its next comedy fest; perhaps in a few months, Mulaney will move to another quirky American city with another quirky band of guests. It’s an interesting concept: What would this type of series be like if it took both it and the city it’s in a little more seriously? What would viewers make of it if we didn’t know as much about the city itself as we’ve absorbed about Los Angeles from decades of cultural osmosis? I’m not saying Everybody’s in Boise is the way to go, but I am saying I’d probably watch it for the local color. Whether this is enough to restore Mulaney to the top of the comedy world seems equally uncertain. The main charm of the show, all told, has less to do with the assemblage of guests than watching Mulaney’s effortless wrangling of them. Night after night, Mulaney embraces all the awkwardness of live comedy, and it doesn’t always embrace back: Often the guests are hostile; the sketches don’t always land; the callers are too eager to grandstand. Mulaney sidesteps it all like it’s Dance Dance Revolution and he knows this particular song by heart. As a host, he’s fab. Yet the idea of Mulaney as a talk show host on an ongoing basis feels like a net loss rather than a gain. Sure, he can bring together comedy titans and make sure they don’t run over an hour, but he’s probably fit for better things. If the dominant criticism of Baby J was that it coasted too lightly over Mulaney’s self-recrimination, then Everybody’s in LA directs his talents entirely outward; it’s intentionally lighthearted, deliberately shallow. There’s meaning in the edges, but that usually has little to do with why we love Mulaney himself. The arguable best moment in the series, in fact, doesn’t involve Mulaney at all, but rather a pretaped segment in episode two that reunites core members of the LA punk scene. They sit around reminiscing, then write a silly punk song together on the fly. It’s fun, it’s poignant. But it’s not as fun or poignant as Mulaney himself can be when he’s alone onstage with only his flaws and a thousand people willing to laugh at and then forgive them. If Everybody’s in LA brings his audience closer to a suspension of hostilities, then it will have been well worth it.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched into space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. Although the mission, backed by a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of activity by would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals such as platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric-vehicle batteries, respectively. Although plenty of these materials exist on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than on mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts of mining on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if, say, space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Or space dirt could be used for astronaut-housing structures and radiation shielding?Previous companies have rocketed toward similar goals before, but they went bust about half a decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the stage, though, “the field has exploded in interest,” says Angel Abbud-Madrid, the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.A lot of the attention has focused on the moon, because nations plan to set up outposts there and will need supplies. NASA, for instance, has ambitions to build an astronaut base camp over the next decade. China, meanwhile, hopes to found an international lunar research station.Still, the pull of space rocks remains powerful, and the new crop of companies remains hopeful. The economic picture has improved with the cost of rocket launches decreasing, as has the regulatory environment, given that countries are creating laws specifically allowing space mining. But only time will tell if this decade’s prospectors will cash in where others have drilled into the red, or if they’ll be buried by their business plan.An asteroid-mining company needs one major ingredient to get started: optimism. A hope that it could start a new industry, one apart from this world. “Not a lot of humans are built to work like that,” says Matt Gialich, a co-founder and the CEO of AstroForge. Since the company’s April 2023 demo mission, it has yet to come close to mining anything.What he and colleagues hope to extract, though, are platinum-group metals, some of which are used in devices such as catalytic converters, which reduce exhaust emissions. Substances such as platinum and iridium, meanwhile, are used in electronics. There are also opportunities in green technology, and new pushes to produce platinum-based batteries with better storage that could end up in electric vehicles and energy-storage systems.To further the company’s goals, AstroForge’s initial mission was loaded with simulated asteroid material and a refinery system designed to extract platinum from the simulant, to show that metal processing could happen in space.Things didn’t go exactly as planned. After the small craft got into orbit, it was hard to identify and communicate with the dozens of other newly launched satellites. The solar panels, which provide the spacecraft with power, wouldn’t deploy at first. And the satellite was initially beset with a wobble that prevented communication. The company has not been able to do the simulated extraction.AstroForge will soon embark on a second mission, with a different goal: to slingshot to an asteroid and take a picture—a surveying project that may help the company understand which valuable materials exist on a particular asteroid.Another company, called TransAstra, is selling a telescope and software designed to detect objects such as asteroids moving through the sky; the Chinese corporation Origin Space has an asteroid-observing satellite in orbit around Earth, and is testing out its mining-relevant technology there. Meanwhile, the Colorado company Karman+ plans to go straight to an asteroid in 2026 and try out excavation equipment.To achieve the ultimate goal of pulling metals from space rocks, TransAstra, Karman+, and AstroForge have received a combined tens of millions of dollars in venture-capital funding.Another company with similar aims, simply called Asteroid Mining Corporation, doesn’t want to rely much on outside investment in the long term. Such reliance, in fact, helped sink earlier companies. Instead, its founder and CEO, Mitch Hunter-Scullion, is focusing his company’s early efforts on terrestrial applications that pay up immediately so he can fund future work in the broader universe. In 2021, the company partnered with Tohoku University Space Robotics Laboratory, based in Japan, to develop space robots.Together, they have built a six-legged robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E. Designed to operate in microgravity, it can crawl around a rugged surface and record data on, and take samples of, what’s there. In 2026, the company plans to do a demonstration mission analyzing soil on the moon.For now, though, SCAR-E will stay on Earth and inspect ship hulls. According to one market-research platform, hull inspections make up a nearly $13-billion market globally—as compared with the asteroid-mining market, currently valued at $0, because no one has yet mined an asteroid.Such grounded work may give the company a revenue stream before, and during, its time in space. “I think every asteroid-mining company has this realization that money runs out, investors get tired, and you have to do something,” Hunter-Scullion says.“My opinion is that, unless you’ve built something which makes sense on Earth,” he adds, “you’re never going to be able to mine an asteroid.”Ian Lange sees sideways applications such as ship inspections as the “gin” of space mining: Lots of distilleries want to make whiskey. But making whiskey requires years of maturing alcohol in a cask. “You can make gin right now,” says Lange, an economist at the Colorado School of Mines. The gin can float a company until its whiskey is ripe.AstroForge is betting that asteroid mining will happen soon enough that it doesn’t need gin.Some of the economics are, in fact, better than they were in the 2010s. Rockets are cheaper than when the prior companies started (and then stopped), for instance. But other considerations are more complicated. For one, Lange says, terrestrial resources are abundant. “It’s not that we don’t have lithium around,” he says, as an example. “The problem is that for a number of reasons, we’re not allowing ourselves to take them out of the ground.” Often, those reasons involve environmental concerns.[Read: The true price of privatizing space travel]For some, extracting materials from space offers a way to reduce the burden on Earth’s resources. That consideration is especially prevalent when it comes to the extraction required for clean-energy technologies, such as hydrogen-fuel production, which uses iridium, and hydrogen-fuel-cell cars, which require platinum. Certain metals—such as nickel, cobalt, and iron—are also more concentrated in asteroids because, unlike Earth’s richest deposits, they haven’t been tapped yet.But space mining isn’t without its own environmental impacts: Rocket launches, for instance, contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, something Lange’s research notes. Extraction from space rocks would likely generate waste and debris, which would float out into the vacuum of space.To combat such concerns, researchers suggested in 2019 that much of the solar system should be set aside as “wilderness,” like protected land on Earth. Allowing exploitation such as mining on only one-eighth of cosmic resources, they wrote, could prevent the kinds of effects that overzealous extraction has wrought at home. In 2021, researchers at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, proposed an environmental-impact framework to assess how damaging a given space-mining project would be, through factors such as how much dust it would stir up.But the kind of public outcry that accompanies endeavors such as deep-sea mining isn’t likely to happen for asteroids: A 2022 study found that the public is largely in favor of asteroid mining, an opinion that held regardless of people’s preconceived ideas about ecological fragility or their political ideology.“People were much more supportive of mining asteroids than other forms of frontier mining like mining the ocean floor, mining Antarctica, and mining the Alaskan tundra,” Matthew Hornsey, the lead author of the paper and a professor at the University of Queensland, in Australia, wrote in an email. “They didn’t raise the same ethical objections that they did to other forms of mining, and they reported little anxiety about it.” Even those who typically would object to mining on environmental grounds felt that way, Hornsey says, likely because they saw the trade-off: Scar the Earth or scrape an asteroid.The same, though, was not true of the moon, where respondents generally disapproved of mining more—sometimes more than they opposed mining in ecologically sensitive areas of Earth. “The moon is visible, beautiful, and associated with purity and spirituality,” Hornsey wrote. “I can see why people might see the need to preserve the sanctity of the moon more so than asteroids.”Regardless of the environmental pros and cons, making the leap to cosmic extraction will likely require further constraints on Earth—for example, stricter environmental regulations—that make space mining more appealing than digging another hole in the ground at home.Still, Lange says, “it’s not clear that we will be able to bring costs down to match terrestrial minerals.” The new optimists are simply willing to make that bet.A few other things have changed since the 2010s: For one, would-be asteroid miners have more data. Recent NASA missions have revealed more about asteroids’ composition and structure.[Read: Is NASA paving the way for asteroid mining?]The regulatory landscape for space mining has also shifted in recent years, says Melissa de Zwart, a professor at the University of Adelaide, in Australia, who specializes in space law. Lack of existing regulation, she says, is part of why the first crop of companies failed. There wasn’t a legal framework that explicitly stated that space mining was allowed.Today, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, and the United States all have legislation enshrining their companies’ and country’s rights to mine space material. The U.S. has also established the Artemis Accords, a set of best practices for behavior on the moon. Other nations have signed on to these principles, which include ensuring that lunar digs align with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the major international law governing space exploration (even though it was enacted long before space mining was on the practical horizon).The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t explicitly prohibit space mining—but it establishes basic rules: The “U.S. couldn’t go to the moon, put the U.S. flag on there, and say, ‘It belongs to us,’ and start mining,” de Zwart says. But the country could extract material—such as ice and metallic rocks—from the moon, or an asteroid, and then own that material. The treaty also says that nations are responsible for what their private companies do, and their activities must benefit humanity.But that framework leaves a lot of gaps—for example, how exactly mining can be done responsibly. And there is talk toward that more logistical end: The Hague International Space Resources Governance Working Group has put together starting points for developing an international how-to framework, and the United Nations has a working group dedicated to the cause.That framework is likely to be tested, with the first proverbial pickax strike, not on asteroids but on the moon, because that’s where humans are set to take their next small steps. “The moment you start talking sustained presence, you’re going to have to start looking at resources,” Abbud-Madrid says.Lunar surveying is already happening, and as of December 2020, NASA has contracts with four companies: Their task is to gather a small amount of material from the lunar surface, as a proof of concept to show that extraction is possible.[Read: Space travel’s existential question]NASA doesn’t have a similar demonstration for mining asteroids. But the space-rock seekers nevertheless continue their quest for treasure, even though its potential payoff is delayed. They believe that Earth needs, and will pay handily for, what space has to offer.At least, that’s the optimistic take. “This has to happen,” Gialich, the AstroForge CEO, says. “And I just hope that we’re the first.”

Following the Dubai floods last month, new scrutiny is being given to weather-manipulation techniques.

A year ago Kayvon Thibodeaux and Azeez Ojulari were planning to be Peanut Butter and Jelly rushing the passer together. Azeez couldn’t stay on the field. What is it now with Brian Burns?

A new book details how once great civilizations have killed each other off.

Pretzels produced by Western Mixers Produce & Nuts, Inc. have been recalled over fears they may be contaminated with salmonella.

Joost Klein was disqualified from the competition following a backstage incident that is being investigated by Swedish police.

A series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections created dazzling auroras that were seen in Germany, England, Wisconsin, Florida and many other places.

The United Nations and other agencies have warned for weeks that an Israeli assault on Rafah, which borders Egypt near the main aid entry points, would cripple humanitarian operations

Celebrity chef Robert Irvine of Florida shared a breakfast waffle recipe with Fox News Digital for Mother's Day 2024. The croque madame dish is sweet and savory.

It's leg day for Sydney Sweeney while Brooke Shields and daughter Rowan twin in red and more in this week's best star snaps.

A New York judge on Friday struck down a Long Island county’s order restricting female transgender athletes from using parks after a local women’s roller derby league challenged it.

"She was playing with it and trapping it and inevitably it would just die in that corner," her owner Laura Elle told Newsweek.

A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.The passage of time is woeful, and, for a parent, living your dreams through the progress of your progeny is as inevitable as the turning of the Earth. But the sports parent lives the experience in concentrate—a more intense version of the common predicament. You must give up your vicarious hope of big-league glory and let it die. You must part from what, if your kid pursued his passion seriously, had become a routine of away games and early-morning practices, hours in the car, a hot cup of coffee in your cold hand as the sun rose above the Wonderland of Ice, in Bridgeport, Connecticut; the Ice Arena in Brewster, New York; the Ice Vault, in Wayne, New Jersey—home of the Hitmen, whose logo is a pin-striped gangster with a hockey stick. And you’ll suddenly find yourself watching the Stanley Cup playoffs not in the way of a civilian but with the chagrin of knowing that the game’s upper ranks will never include your kid.One recent morning, courtesy of Facebook Memories, I came across an old picture of my son, a high-school junior who recently announced his decision to quit hockey—to retire! The photo was taken by teammates after a victory at Lake Placid, New York. Sweat-soaked, draped in the arms of friends, grinning like a thief, he looked no less ecstatic than Mike Eruzione after he and his team won Olympic gold in the same arena in 1980.And me? I was this Eruzione’s old man, waiting with the other parents outside the locker room, experiencing a moment of satisfaction greater than any other I’d known, either as a player or as a fan. I was a car in park with the accelerator pressed to the floor. I was a wall bathed in sunlight. This win was better than the Illinois State Championship I won with the Deerfield Falcons, in 1977. It was better than the Bears’ 1986 Super Bowl victory.[Read: I thought I’d found a cheat code for parenting]The end began like this: One evening, after the last game of the high-school season, I asked my son if he’d be trying out for spring league. For a youth-hockey kid, playing spring league is the equivalent of a minor-league pitcher playing winter ball in Mexico—so necessary as a statement of intent and means of improvement that forgoing it is like giving up “the path.” Rather than a simple affirmative nod, as I’d expected, I got these words: “I’m going to think about it.” Think about it? For me, this was the same as a girlfriend saying, “We need to talk.”Only later did I realize that those words were the first move in a careful choreography. My son wanted to quit, but in a way that would not break my heart. He also didn’t want me to rant and rave and try to talk him out of it.We had reversed roles. He was the adult. I was the child.He knew he would not be playing college hockey even if he could. With this in mind, he had decided to use his final year of high school to get to know people other than hockey players and spend time in places other than hockey rinks. In the way of a pro with iffy knees nearing the age of 35, he had decided to exit on his own terms. He was not worrying about losing his identity as a player or about missing the camaraderie of the locker room; he was worrying about me. Hockey had been an entire epoch of our father-son life. It had ushered me, the sports parent, out of my 30s, through my 40s, and into my 50s.[Derek Thompson: American meritocracy is killing youth sports]My son began playing hockey in 2012. At 5 years old, he was among the army of kids enrolled in Ice Mice. He climbed the ranks from there: Mite to Squirt, Squirt to Peewee, Peewee to Bantam, Bantam to Midget. He had no inherent genius for the game, but he loved it, and that love, which was his talent, and the corresponding desire to spend every free moment at the facility—the life of a rink rat—jumping onto the ice whenever an extra player was needed, shooting tape balls in the lobby, made him an asset. A kid can have all the skills, speed, size, and shot, but if he doesn’t want to be there, if he doesn’t love the game, it’s not going to work.It was passion that got him onto the top teams (this was tier-two and tier-three hockey in Fairfield County, Connecticut) and thus sowed the seed that eventually became, for me, a bitter plant. His love for the game elevated him to the hypercompetitive, goal-fixated ranks, where it’s always about the next tryout and the next season, who will make it and, more important, who will be left behind. Irony: His love for the game had carried him to a level where no love is possible.When people accuse sports parents of living through their kids, they mean that the parent wants the kid to achieve in a way they never did. But that’s only part of the story. For most of us, the reward is in the present, not the past. You’re treated better when your kid scores; your status is raised. Your kid being on the top team puts you, or so many people in my world seem to believe, in a higher class of parent. If your kid is demoted, dropped from the AA squad to A or (yikes!) from A to B, your status and social life are diminished. It’s like experiencing a financial reversal.Because I am human, I tend to blame entities or systems or other people for things that strike me as unfair. As my son progressed, I caught a glimpse, for one fabulous, deluded moment, of the life that he (we, I) would never live: high-school athletic stardom followed by college triumph and possibly even a professional-hockey career. That I knew this was a fantasy—he was never that good—did not make it less powerful. Lost in it, I experienced my life as an NHL fan with new intensity. I was not just watching the Blackhawks; I was scouting, picking up tricks that I could pass to my glory-bound boy. This was a dream that I was too embarrassed to share with anyone, even my wife. I regarded it the way members of the Free French regarded the liberation of Paris: Think of it always; speak of it never.In short, I lost my way. Rather than letting him enjoy the moment and the fact that these seasons were his career, not a preparation or a path toward one, I was constantly scheming about his next move, his next opportunity, his next shot at the big time.Here’s the worst part: I knew exactly what I was doing. I was attempting to replace my kid’s will with my own. I knew that it was wrong and, worse, counterproductive. The more I pressed, the less he enjoyed the game. The less he enjoyed the game, the worse he played. The worse he played, the more I pressed. Economists call this a negative feedback loop. I knew it but could not stop. It was psychosis.Maybe the most notorious sports parents suffer from a shared psychological condition. LaVar Ball, Emmanuel Agassi, Earl Woods—those sports dads were all obsessed to the point of being abusive. I prefer to think that I am not; yet, for all the varying degrees of our kid’s success, our predicament is the same. At some point, even if it comes after 20 years in the pros, the set will be rolled away, revealing our true location. Rink parking lot. Beat-up vehicle. Alone. Even the child prodigies will retire.[Read: You’ll miss sports journalism when it’s gone]I told my wife that I feared our son would realize, too late, that he missed the game. He has the rest of his life to goof around; this was his last chance to be in there, mixing it up, instead of watching from the sidelines. But I was mostly anxious for myself. How was I going to survive all those endless winters without hockey? And what about the fantasies of TV cutaways, with the NHL announcer saying, “And there’s the man who taught him how to skate!” By entering my fever dream and pointing the way out, my son was behaving like the parent who says, “It’s going to be okay. There’s plenty to live for. It’s time to move on.”Although it’s over for me and my kid, I do not want to sell the experience short. It was mostly wonderful: He played for a dozen years, from ages 5 to 17; that was his career in the game. In that time, he accumulated so many stats—goals, assists, penalty minutes, and so on—that the print on the back of his hockey card, if he had one, would require reading glasses to examine. He learned how to play on a team, support his linemates, stand up to bad coaches, learn from good ones. He learned that getting hit, even getting laid out, is not the worst thing, that scoring is better revenge than hitting back, that there is more to learn from losing than from winning, but that too much losing is soul-destroying, that the joys of victory are fleeting, and that it’s the physical sensations—the feel of your skate blades cutting freshly surfaced ice, the weight of the puck on your stick—that stay with you.

The U.N. food agency says more than 300 Afghans have died in flash floods that also destroyed more than 1,000 houses in the northern province of Baghlan.

Going south, fast I can’t understand why people are abusing boarding instructions (“Shady Southwest passengers are abusing the preboarding process — and fellow flyers are furious,” May 8). They shouldn’t — when they do, they should be told to stop. If they continue, then Southwest should put in its policies that if you abuse the...

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There’s a clear and obvious answer to the humanitarian worries President Biden is trying to blackmail Israel with as a full-scale Rafah invasion looms.

Judge Merchan said he was surprised that Trump's lawyers did not object more to Daniels' graphic description of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump.

Dutch artist Joost Klein will no longer compete in Saturday night’s Eurovision grand final in Malmo due to a backstage “incident,” the European Broadcasting Union said.

At the same time, the three are accusing each other of being pro-transgender.

Readers of the Los Angeles Times Sports section share their thoughts on the Lakers and Clippers after their first-round playoff losses.

The city of Long Beach saw a drop in homelessness for the first time in seven years, while the unhoused population continued to grow in Orange County from 2022 to 2024.