Defector
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The USMNT’s World Cup Exit Was Too Sad And Too Familiar
It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team that plays enough of them will have their specific strengths and shortcomings put on display, some more immutable than others. The teams that tend to thrive in the World Cup are the ones most capable of shrinking the distan...
MLB Is Now Promoting A Salary Cap Between Innings
You weren't watching MLB.TV on Sunday, because NBC bought out all of the day's games and locked most of them behind their billions-losing streaming service. But if you were tuned in for out-of-market baseball in the days prior, like I was, you may have been delivered an advertisement from MLB itself that served as a stark reminder of just how badly the league's owners want to cap their players' salaries. The commercials on MLB.TV are part of the league's "Level The Playing Field" campaign, ...
Gifts, Gritos, And A Breakthrough Win: An Afternoon With The Tour de France’s New And Jubilant Mexican Fanbase
BARCELONA — " Pogito! Hermano! Ya eres Mexicano !" sang the gathered dozens. Over an hour after Isaac del Toro won Stage 2 of the Tour de France, an enthusiastic knot of 40-ish tricolor -clad fans was still patiently at the barriers. Some came from Mexico, some lived in Barcelona. Most had been there sweating in the unrelenting sun since early afternoon, though what's that compared to the 36-year wait for a Mexican rider to win again at the sport's biggest race, as Raul Alcala did in 1990? ...
ESPN’s Matt Miller Investigated For Alleged Consumer Fraud While Recovering From Emergency Arm Amputation
Matt Miller, an on-air NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, is presently recovering from, among other injuries, the emergency amputation of his left arm. Probably there are not too many kinds of trouble in Miller's life that measure up against that one. But trouble is waiting, and not very patiently: The Missouri Attorney General's office confirmed late last week that it is actively investigating Miller on consumer-protection grounds. In the time since he and his family mobilized public support around ...
The Folarin Balogun Red Card Brouhaha Is A Vintage FIFA Disaster
Just a day after FIFA rescinded Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round-of-16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, the story keeps on rolling thanks to FIFA's innate FIFA-ness. On Monday, the Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement about the whole mess, which has raised the twin specters of corruption and incompetence. ...
Poor A’s Fans Can’t Even Get Properly Perfecto’d
If there could have been a story to rival England's Jordan Henderson getting yellow-carded and then breaking his arm without actually playing, it would have been Brian Serven homering in the ninth inning of Marlins-Athletics to complete the comeback di tutti comebacks, and that's even allowing for the fact that England-Mexico at the Azteca was arguably a more momentous event than Marlins-Athletics no matter where it was played. That it was played in West Sacramento just added to the mutant ...
The Crossword, July 6: We’re Halfway There
Stay in line, and do our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Peggy Sue Marlin , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Peggy Sue works in systems and data automation and enjoys golfing and DIY projects. She won her school spelling bee on the word "cheeseburger," then was eliminated at regionals on "asphyxiation." Her parents shared her disappointment, though they were secretly relieved she didn't know that word yet. Fortunately, dealing with that level of heartbreak at a young age prepared ...
The Ducks Screwed Themselves
I think it's important we set some axioms for discussion of Anaheim's Leo Carlsson signing an offer sheet with Philadelphia , because it helps a superficially mindblowing contract feel something closer to logical—both in that the Flyers were wise to offer it, and in that the Ducks would be fools not to match it. The first thing to be agreed upon is that Carlsson is very, very good: 21 years old, putting up better numbers every year, 67 points in his third season. Whether you think he's neared ...
That’s Why This Shit Rules
Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped the Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness of his voice. It was an unusual thing to see, but befitting of the game Kane had just played, which was so strange, so dramatic, that it was easy to imagine most everyone who watched or played in it being left speechless. ...
Banger British Grand Prix Ends With A Whimper
Perhaps I can at least thank Max Verstappen for the clarity. Before he ran his Red Bull car into the wall on the 49th of the Silverstone Circuit's 52 laps, the British Grand Prix was shaping up to be too exciting to be coherent. It got off to an uncharacteristically slow start, yes, to the point where I wrote "first half shocking processional for silverstone" in my notes and was prepared to place some blame on the sprint format for the ongoing viewership woes. But shortly after, as though the ...
FIFA Makes Good And Right And Not At All Corrupt Decision To Rescind Folarin Balogun’s Red Card Suspension
The USMNT was the talk of the soccer world in the aftermath of its triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina last Wednesday. Most of the conversation was about the latest amazing U.S. performance in a tournament full of them , and the growing consensus that the Americans should be considered overwhelming favorites to go ahead and win the World Cup. However, a sizable portion of the discussion also centered on the referee's scandalous decision to show U.S. striker Folarin Balogun a totally unfair red...
A Shockingly Positive Review Of World Cup Public Transit In Los Angeles
Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of "public" and "transit," such as Los Angeles. Together, all three cities compose the "Doable But Miserable" tier of Aaron Gordon's breakdown of World Cup stadium transit access, which also elaborates on how the new Los Angeles stadium and its surro...
Jonas Vingegaard Made It Out Alive, Then Made Barcelona Smile
BARCELONA — "Every swarm needs a face," declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike's new bee mascot , "and every face needs a name." Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was one for the insects. As if to bless Visma for their honeycomb jerseys out of an oblique entomic solidarity, the swarm of cicadas nestled in the scrubby pines atop Montjuïc thrummed Jonas Vingegaard to victory on Saturday's...
Darren Aronofsky’s AI Videos Are A Fitting Tribute To America, I Guess
Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video model Veo and an AI video tool called Flow, while Aronofsky, like a worrying number of other filmmakers , sought to forge a new and daring path into unknown technological territory by partnering with one of the world's bigges...
25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as muc...
Try To Cool Off In The July 4th Weekend Open Thread
Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.
‘The Final Set’ Tells The Story Of Tennis’ Greatest Rivalry Becoming A Friendship
There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set , a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: ovarian for Evert, breast and throat for Navratilova. After beating back the disease, they each go in for a scan. Just before sliding into the tubular machine, Evert hesitates, then removes her cap for comfort, revealing he...
Your Guide To The 2026 Tour de France
Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour, starting on July 4, will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France while flirting with the Swiss and German borders. The route's 54,450 meters of vertical gain make it the third-most demanding Tour of the last 20 years, though that's deceptive, since a lot of that gain is ...
The Passion According To A. Frog
Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to understand who I have been and what I have done, or, rather, what has been done to me. Some days I am not sure even I believe in myself. Am I really so alone in my experience of this world? Have other frogs tasted the noxious n...
Belgium Cannot Be Understood By The Pedestrian Soccer Mind
It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgium men's national soccer team, which takes this adage one fallacy further by being different teams within the same game, and doing it repeatedly so that the cagey analyst just walks away at the start of the national anthem...
Unlike The Defendants, One Of The Prairieland Judges Is Part Of An Organized Cell Of Extremists
Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer Lauren Fadiman pointed out in The Baffler , the media often uses "Prairieland ICE shooting" as a misleading shorthand for the protest. What actually happened is hard to capture in three words. On the night of July 4, 20...
Only A Complete Asshole Would Get Married At Madison Square Garden
This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member . The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and any where , they like. Except for … One of the biggest even...
OK, This Is Probably Too Much Talk About The KLF
Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent . I also would have known that Drummo...
Dead Country Fair
Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the sound of his own voice saying all the famous things that he says. The picture-book binaries that define and proscribe his understanding of the world—big and small, good and bad, hot and cold, rich and poor, white and not whi...
This 17th-Century Flemish Painting Held A Gnarly Bat Secret
To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia. Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark . In the 1500s, European e...
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