Culture
2023-24 NFL Week 18 playoff scenarios: Packers, Bills, Steelers clinch berths
The Jacksonville Jaguars lost to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday setting off some AFC playoff dominoes. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Buffalo Bills clinched playoff spots with the Jags’ loss. This also gave the Houston Texans the AFC South title.
And later, the Bills gained the AFC East title by beating the Miami Dolphins on Sunday night.
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Plus, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers punched their ticket to the postseason capturing the NFC South crown with a sluggish win over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. And the Green Bay Packers grabbed the last remaining NFC wild card berth by beating the Chicago Bears.
Below is a glimpse at all the scenarios for every team with playoff life remaining.
Follow here for live updates from NFL Week 18 and here for live updates on Buffalo Bills vs Miami Dolphins.
AFC
Clinched
- Baltimore Ravens (13-4) — AFC North division title, No. 1 seed, first-round bye and home-field advantage
- Buffalo Bills (11-6) — AFC East division title
- Kansas City Chiefs (11-6) — AFC West division title
- Houston Texans (10-7) — AFC South division title
- Cleveland Browns (11-6) — playoff berth
- Miami Dolphins (11-6) — playoff berth
- Pittsburgh Steelers (10-7) — playoff berth
Bracket seedings
- Ravens
- Bills
- Chiefs
- Texans
- Browns
- Dolphins
- Steelers
GO DEEPER
NFL QB EPA rankings: Lamar Jackson’s atypical route to a probable NFL MVP award
NFC
Clinched
- San Francisco 49ers (12-4) — NFC West division title, No. 1 seed, first-round bye and home-field advantage
- Dallas Cowboys (12-5) — NFC East division title
- Detroit Lions (12-5) — NFC North division title
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers (9-8) — NFC South division title
- Philadelphia Eagles (11-6) — playoff berth
- Los Angeles Rams (10-7) — playoff berth
- Green Bay Packers (9-8) — playoff berth
GO DEEPER
Bears couldn’t stop Jordan Love and didn’t have the quarterback who could outplay him
Bracket seedings
- 49ers
- Cowboys
- Lions
- Buccaneers
- Eagles
- Rams
- Packers
GO DEEPER
NFL Week 18 schedule: Bills-Dolphins clash on SNF
Required reading
- NFL Week 18 playoff standings and projections: Which teams have best chance to make postseason?
- Russini: What I’m hearing about the NFL coaching carousel entering Week 18
- NFL Power Rankings Week 18: Browns and Packers move up, plus a lesson from every team
(Photo: John Fisher / Getty Images)
Culture
Video: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
new video loaded: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
transcript
transcript
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay became the first British Hungarian to win the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.”
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“I think fiction can take risks. I think it’s one of the things that it can do. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.” “I think all six of the books in the short list really, you know, not — it’s not saying this is the headline theme, but there is that theme of reaching out, wanting a connection.”
By Shawn Paik
November 11, 2025
Culture
Test Yourself on the Settings Mentioned in These Novels About Road Trips
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Culture
This Poem About Monet’s “Water Lilies” Reflects on the Powers and Limits of Art
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
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