The first Friday of spring arrives with sneakers for the city, the most chaotic opening day of March Madness in years, Ryan Gosling launching into theaters, and the White House laying down its first federal AI blueprint. Here's what matters today.
Sneakers
Two drops hit today that are worth your attention, and one more on the horizon demands it.
The Nike Ja 3 "Tri-State" (IQ6705-001, $135) is out now on SNKRS and at select retailers. The Black/Baltic Blue/Total Orange/Hyper Pink colorway is a straight-up New York metro tribute, and it lands the way a Ja Morant collab should — loud, confident, and tied to a cultural geography rather than just a team. Ja is the most charismatic guard in the NBA under 25. His shoes earn placement in the lifestyle lane, and the Tri-State manages to be both a regional flex and a wearable-everywhere sneaker.
The Nike GT Future "Swooshman" (IQ7277-001, $210) is also live today as a SNKRS pre-order in a Metallic Silver/Black-University Red colorway. It's a cleaner, more surgical silhouette than the GT Cut — performance-forward with enough aesthetic restraint to work beyond the court. The pre-order format means you're getting it on Nike's timetable, not the refresh-and-pray schedule, which is either a feature or a bug depending on where you stand on anticipation.
Also dropping today: the Nike KD 6 "PBJ" (IB6903-800, $145) in Laser Orange/Black-Raspberry Red. A throwback colorway on a genuinely underrated Durant silhouette — the KD 6 is overdue for cultural reappraisal, and this is an accessible entry point at $145.
Looking ahead: the Nike Kobe 5 Protro "Lower Merion Aces" (IM0557-001, $200) drops March 23 in White/Team Red. High school team colors on the Kobe 5 Protro carry a different weight than a standard retro — this is a provenance story, Kobe's Ardmore, Pennsylvania roots rendered in footwear. It's one of the more emotionally resonant drops of the month and will move fast. The Sneakers section has more on what's still to come this month.
Sports
March Madness arrived on Thursday and immediately gave everyone exactly what they came for. The Round of 64 delivered three legitimate upsets and a collection of close calls that obliterated the "NIL killed the tournament" narrative, at least for one day.
The story of the day was VCU over No. 6 North Carolina, 82-78 in overtime — the largest comeback in Round of 64 history. The Rams trailed by 19 in the second half. Guard Terrence Hill Jr. hit the go-ahead three in overtime and finished with 34 points off the bench. UNC has made it past the first weekend exactly once since 2022. The program's post-Davis era is starting to look like a genuine identity crisis.
No. 12 High Point 83, No. 5 Wisconsin 82 was the kind of sports moment that produces screenshots. Chase Johnston — a graduate transfer who entered the game 0-for-4 from inside the arc in 32 games — caught an outlet pass in the final seconds and hit the game-winning layup. His first two-point basket of the season. The Panthers play Arkansas or Hawaii next.
No. 1 Duke survived No. 16 Siena, 71-65 — and that sentence tells you how close it got. Duke trailed 47-34 in the second half. Coach Scheyer said after the game that Siena's Gerry McNamara out-coached him. A team that needed an injury-depleted Siena to test them should be watched carefully when the competition stiffens.
Meanwhile, BYU's AJ Dybantsa dropped 35 points and 10 rebounds in an 11-seeded Texas loss — what was almost certainly his final college game before the 2026 NBA Draft. He's expected to go No. 1 overall and gave the tournament the kind of swan song performance that makes the first round appointment viewing.
Today's second round games begin at 12:15 p.m. ET, with Kentucky vs. Santa Clara, Texas Tech vs. Akron, and No. 1 Arizona vs. Long Island University among the slate. Arizona is the consensus safest bet to reach Indianapolis.
In the NBA, LeBron James tied Robert Parish's all-time games played record on Thursday at 1,611 games — in Miami, of all places, flying in at 4 a.m. after a back-to-back despite left foot arthritis. Read our full breakdown on LeBron and the record. He breaks it outright in his next game.
On the women's side, the WNBA's new CBA — announced early Wednesday morning — is the most significant labor agreement in the league's history: salary cap jumping from $1.5M to $7M, supermax rising from $249K to $1.4M, first-ever revenue sharing averaging 20% of league revenue. Full analysis here.
Culture
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters today and is the most anticipated sci-fi film of the year by a considerable margin. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he's traveling toward Tau Ceti — gradually piecing together that he's humanity's only chance to prevent an extinction-level threat. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The LEGO Movie), co-starring Sandra Hüller. The source material — Andy Weir's novel — is tightly constructed and emotionally potent in a way that The Martian wasn't quite. The Lord-Miller sensibility is the right tone for it: earnest intelligence over genre spectacle. Opening weekend numbers will determine whether the studio has faith in the sequel setup the book demands.
Also worth noting in culture today: Fab 5 Freddy is making the rounds promoting his new memoir, Everybody's Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture. Freddy — original host of Yo! MTV Raps, Bronx hip-hop pioneer, friend of Andy Warhol, is one of the undersung architects of how hip-hop crossed into the mainstream. The memoir is a reminder that cultural legitimacy was built person by person, party by party, before algorithms existed.
The Oscars are still reverberating: One Battle After Another took Best Picture, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners, and Jessie Buckley took Best Actress for Hamnet. Jordan's win for Sinners is the most culturally loaded Oscar story of the year — a film about Black history, sound, and Southern mythology walking away with the most visible prize in Hollywood. The full cultural reckoning with what that film means is still being written.
On the streaming front: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the Netflix movie-length sequel that brings Cillian Murphy back as Tommy Shelby. His estranged son has taken control of the gang. Six seasons built an audience for this world; whether a film format can sustain the momentum is the question.
Technology
The White House dropped its national AI framework today — a policy document that builds on Trump's December executive order and calls for federal AI standards, online safety protections for children, streamlined permitting for on-site data center power generation, and anti-censorship provisions aimed at tech companies. The framework is the clearest signal yet that the federal government intends to own AI regulation before states fragment the landscape. Whether Congress can deliver a coherent bill from it is the operative question — but the fact that the executive branch is now moving on legislative groundwork shifts the dynamic considerably for every AI lab operating in the US.
That policy news lands at the end of a week defined by NVIDIA GTC 2026, which wrapped Thursday in San Jose. Jensen Huang's $1 trillion order projection through 2027, the Vera Rubin platform delivering 3.6 exaflops, Microsoft bringing Vera Rubin NVL72 systems live in Azure, and the NemoClaw enterprise agent framework all pointed in the same direction: NVIDIA is not building chips. It's building the operating system for the agentic era. Full GTC recap here.
Separately, Jeff Bezos is in early conversations to raise $100 billion through Project Prometheus — a fund targeting manufacturing acquisitions in chipmaking, defense, and aerospace, with AI transformation as the explicit value thesis. The pitch deck uses sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Singapore as the capital source. The macro bet: American industrial manufacturing is structurally undervalued right now, and proprietary physical-world AI models are the lever that changes the math. Our full breakdown on the Bezos fund is here.
In the AI revenue race: OpenAI has crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue and is reportedly exploring a public listing as early as late 2026. Anthropic is approaching $19 billion. The market for advanced AI models has become one of the fastest-growing sectors in technology history — and the gap between the top labs and everyone else is widening.
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