Le Journal

En avance sur le record du trophée Jules Verne, Thomas Coville et son équipage vont terminer leur tour du monde dans des conditions météo épouvantables.

Le monde de la tech est en état de choc. Elon Musk, l’homme qui jurait de ne jamais introduire SpaceX en Bourse avant d’avoir colonisé Mars, s’apprête à briser son propre tabou. Pourquoi ce revirement ? Parce qu’en 2026, la course à l’espace n’est plus seulement une question d’exploration : c’est devenue la guerre totale pour l’infrastructure physique de...

Un rapport publié le 20 janvier 2026 par l’ONG Prisoners Defenders dresse un constat glaçant : à Cuba, la surveillance numérique n’est plus un simple dispositif sécuritaire mais un véritable système de contrôle politique généralisé. Sur la base de 200 témoignages anonymes recueillis entre novembre 2025 et janvier 2026, ce document de 55 pages décrit […]

Major League Table Tennis matches make it clear: The hype for ping-pong shouldn't end at Marty Supreme.  by Corbin Smith There’s a scene in the recent hit movie Marty Supreme in which Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), an American table tennis champion and inveterate liar getting by on the skin of his teeth in post-WWII America, is seeking capital from a wealthy man, hoping to grow the game he loves and his own prestige. At one point, in a rare move for the character, Marty tells the truth: “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m telling you, this game fills stadiums overseas.” In the 70 years since Marty Supreme— a fictional story rooted in reality— is set, the tale of table tennis as a public concern has remained more or less the same. It’s a fabulously deep and entertaining sports product that has been relegated to club enthusiasm and occasional Olympics heat in the United States, but is huge overseas, especially in Asia. Anirban Ghosh, who plays for the Texas Smash. Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), a touring table tennis startup league founded in 2023, is trying to make the sport big in the US, too. (The league bills itself as “AMERICA'S FIRST PROFESSIONAL TABLE TENNIS LEAGUE,” capitalization their own.) The format is very particular. Instead of playing one-on-one for individual glory, players from around the world are sorted into teams. Each team is given a city they are intended to represent, even if none of their players actually live there, and sets of teams go from “home” city to “home” city every weekend, playing in team-based matches. Four teams, including the Portland Paddlers, descended on the Portland Convention Center earlier this month to play a total of six matches over three days. One member of the Paddlers, Nihkil Kumar, appeared as one of Marty’s opponents in Marty Supreme. He says he squared off against Timothée Chalamet between the shooting and beat him soundly, even as he was compelled to lose to him on camera. MLTT forgoes a common scoring practice in racquet sports, where games are almost always won when a player crosses a point threshold AND beats their opponent by two points. By contrast, MLTT games end when one player reaches 11 points. This makes it so matches can start and end at fairly routine times. But it also strips the product of the terrible and wonderful psychological pressure that comes when two players cannot seem to ever beat each other. Hiromitsu Kasahara of the Texas Smash. But that’s a small complaint, because the table tennis was phenomenal. MLTT is a minor league, now and for the foreseeable future, but it’s managed to contract some really good, entertaining talent. They’re not top players striding atop the World Table Tennis (WTT) rankings, but they’re players from around the world who sit in the top 250 in the World Table Tennis rankings, solid talent who put on a hell of a show for enthusiastic crowds all weekend. In the first match of the Portland MLTT tournament on Saturday, January 10, Braxton Chang of the Atlanta Blazers (confusing, I know) squared off against David McBeath of the Texas Smash. The two were really going at it, back and forth, back and forth, the ball whipping across the table with terrible force for a lil’ guy filled with air. Both players strained to unearth the sharpest edge of their perception to hit the ball so their opponent would miss the hit. David McBeath of the Texas Smash. They could achieve this in a variety of ways. Table tennis is a very tactical game, in ways that an onlooker can’t always appreciate. Every paddle surface gives players different options for imposing spin on that tiny lil’ ball and sending it to the other side of the table. Christian Lillieroos, the coach of the Portland Paddlers, says the table tennis ball can travel at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, spinning at a rate of 9000 rotations per minute, or about 150 rotations every second. From a distance, the ball’s movements can be hard to appreciate. At one point, I…