Is This The End For Gianni Infantino?

All Gianni Infantino needed was patience. Memory for scandal is short, even in a sport as massive as soccer, and whatever controversies the FIFA president willingly courted during the 2026 World Cup would have soon faded into the background as he won what was going to be an unopposed re-election next March. He could have ridden off into the sunset in 2031 and made millions off the connections built during his tenure at the head of FIFA. That wasn't enough for him, though, and so now, the walls are instead closing in, a self-inflicted error caused by greed and a plan to turn the World Cup into a private equity playground. The post-tournament afterglow was short, and now Infantino faces opposition from most (but, crucially, not all) corners of the soccer world, his ending looming on a quickly approaching horizon. UEFA's threat to boycott the World Cup if Infantino went ahead with his investor sell-off was the first domino in a process that ended with Infantino retracting the proposal himself. Since then, it was only a matter of time before the question became what sort of fallout would be in store for Infantino due to his enormous failure. It wasn't surprising that the gears of his potential ousting began turning in Europe once more. First, UEFA responded to Infantino's retraction by saying its leaders had "lost confidence" in him. That phrase served as both a statement of UEFA's enduring disapproval and a further threat, hinting at the possibility of a formal vote of no confidence, which would be the first step in ejecting Infantino from FIFA. Soccer's national and continental associations then followed suit. Wales first made that move on Wednesday, withdrawing its letter of support for Infantino's re-election. England's Football Association soon followed, and the ball kept on rolling from there. Serbia, Sweden, and Finland (which first broached the topic last week) have all officially withdrawn their support. The message, at least from certain parts of the soccer world, is clear: Infantino must go. Infantino isn't on an island all alone, however. His work in courting smaller associations around the world has built for him a base of support that has held up even in this period of blunder. As of now, Infantino has reportedly received reiterations of support from about 15 nations, including Qatar and Morocco, two World Cup hosts (the former hosted in 2022, and the latter will be one of the co-hosts in 2030). Egypt, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Kuwait round out the group of seven nations that have already gone public with their support, with eight others reportedly doing so in private. The big domino yet to fall in either direction is Saudi Arabia, which will host the 2034 World Cup. The awarding of that tournament to Saudi Arabia was one of the bigger controversies of Infantino's tenure.

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The Women’s Pro Baseball League Will Eventually Need To Escape The Past

You may think you've experienced joy before, but you had previously never seen a mascot version of a 99-year-old woman with a cane dancing and cartwheeling around a baseball field in Springfield, Ill., which ushered in the inaugural weekend of the first professional women’s baseball league in nearly 30 years. I have never been happier than I was witnessing that moment. Our lives are all downhill from here. That mascot is modeled after Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, honorary chair for the new Women's Pro Baseball League advisory board, and wearer of iconic sunglasses. As was mentioned several times on the broadcasts of the WPBL's first two games, she broke four ribs and still made sure she was in Springfield for the occasion. Because I risk writing 1,000 words about everything I love about Maybelle Blair, I will put it succinctly: She is cool as fuck. The mascot Blair is not dressed in the human Blair's sensible slacks, nor the WPBL's uniform. Instead, mascot Maybelle wears the skirted uniform of the AAGPBL that many will recognize from _A League of Their Own_. The AAGPBL was everywhere during the new league's opening weekend. Springfield, the location for all of its games this season, was chosen specifically to reference the historic league. Former players came to watch. Fans wore Rockford Peaches merchandise and shirts that read "There's no crying in baseball." And commentators made reference to the famous "dirt in the skirt" line from the movie when talking about sliding. But the women of the WPBL wear pants, and they don't have to perform a rigid version of femininity. That's a big deal, even now.

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Concussion Protocols Are A Sham

_Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind?__Email the Funbag_ _. You can also read Drew over at_ SFGATE_, and_ buy Drew’s books_while_ you’re at it_. Today, we're talking about flouting the law, botched first dates, jealous dickheads, and more._ Drew is off today. I have seized the means of Funbagging and, as is my custom, forgotten to make use of them until the last second. With that in mind, let's get to... Your dang letters:

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Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Kansas City Chiefs

_Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far_ here_._ **Your team:** It’s over.

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David Ellison’s Bid To Control Warner Bros. Hits The Rocks

Until a month ago, everything was going great for David Ellison and his plan to control American cultural production. He'd successfully made Paramount an outer arm of the Trump administration, with all the lucrative sinecures and harrowing moral and journalistic compromises that come with such an arrangement. Ellison's smooth ascent to power took a little bump when he lost the initial bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, but his father is Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, and he's a close ally of Donald Trump, so he threatened and bought his way into a hostile takeover that WBD shareholders approved in February and the U.S. Justice Department approved in June. Congratulations, David Ellison, nobody will make a good movie or say anything faintly critical about Israel on CNN ever again. Or so he thought. Even before the DOJ rubber-stamped the deal, Bloomberg reported that several states were looking into mounting a joint legal challenge. On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit in Sacramento after getting 11 other states including New York to join him in the legal effort. In a column for Variety (which, balls and strikes, needed a little editing) that dropped alongside the suit, Bonta wrote that the merger would create a super-entity immune from competition, one that could exert the directed force of monopoly control. "By combining two of the five largest film distributors and two of the five largest basic cable channel owners, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly one-third of theatrical movie distribution and nearly one-third of basic cable channels," Bonta wrote. "It would control more than 30 percent of the blockbuster release distribution that buoys the movie theater business and 50 of the most popular cable TV channels, spanning an unrivaled slate of news, sports, entertainment, kids, family, factual, and lifestyle content." The result? "That’s a death knell for the film and TV industry—and for our democracy."

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Reality Has Set In For The San Francisco Giants

Maybe we've been viewing Harrison Bader all wrong. Not that he hasn't behaved like a Thanksgiving ham in a batting helmet, but he may have spurred his soon-to-be former employers to accept their current situation with a clearer eye and purpose. And with some gelignite. The San Francisco Giants have been freefalling all season long, which if nothing else marks a refreshing change from their decade of mediocrity in stasis. The amazing thing about their season is that they still haven't chased away their in-house fan base despite an uninterrupted series of decisions that would not be much different if they had been aimed at doing just that. Maybe lousy community and corporate relationships, plus some truly hideous baseball have unlocked some masochistic impulse in the regional baseball-going public; it seems to have worked for _Love Island_ , after all. On Monday, with the looming MLB trade deadline and 112 games of diaper-grade baseball as impetus, the fellows finally faced their fears and fraudulence and began tackling the rebuild they had always said they wouldn't entertain. Not with Bader, mind you—they're just trying to void his contract on the grounds that a professional athlete should be able to avoid driving his scooter into a fire truck—but with what has happened since.

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The Right Has Created Its Perfect Trans Athlete

A lot of people in and around the WNBA are talking about trans women. In the aftermath of Indiana Fever role player Sophie Cunningham's negative comments about trans people playing sports in an ESPN profile, transphobic right-wing grifters and small groups of protesters have made a show of themselves at her games. In response, Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton was suspended by the league for telling off a couple of Cunningham boosters, while coaches like Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase have given statements in support of trans women and girls participating in sports. Still others in the league, like Caitlin Clark, Fire coach Alex Sarama, and Fever coach Stephanie White have delivered more mealy-mouthed quotes about this controversy that Fox News describes as a "culture war" and ESPN describes as "the disunited United States that shadows the WNBA." If you came across these headlines as a non-sports fan, it would probably be fair for you to assume that there's a trans woman playing in the WNBA, or at least one at a high level in college who might be drafted soon. Google's autocomplete suggestions, which offer phrases like "trans wnba star" or "wnba player who looks like a man," imply that some number of curious people are trying to put a proper name to all this chatter. But there's no such trans basketball player. Not unlike that period in the 2000s when male athletes would get asked if they'd be comfortable with an imaginary gay teammate, these quotes, both for and against, are all about trans women and girls as a concept, as opposed to an actual woman who could potentially speak for herself. So why is anyone talking about this? Let's go back to the most memorable presidential campaign ad of 2024, the one I remember seeing all over the MLB playoffs that year: "Kamala is for they/them, not you." Following Donald Trump's win, a number of people upset by the result blamed trans people—as a concept—for the Democratic Party's defeat, while Republicans went full steam ahead with the idea that they could win by publicizing that their opponents weren't sufficiently anti-trans. It's no secret that they see women's sports as the key wedge issue that they can use to their advantage, selling people who might otherwise recoil at their policies on the idea that a handful of athletic trans girls and an even smaller number of athletic trans women with comparable hormone levels to cis women represent some existential threat to womanhood—and that the only way forward would be mandatory sex testing for any girl who might want to play soccer or volleyball with her friends.

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If Baseball Is Ruined, Show Me The Ruins

The Los Angeles Dodgers got Tarik Skubal, damn them. Damn them for having money; damn them for being too damn good; damn them for ruining baseball. That they got Skubal, the hottest commodity on the stove at the trade deadline, for relative peanuts, well. In this case, you damn everyone else. This trade will ostensibly impact the Dodgers' odds through the 2026 World Series, though that's the least relevant part of the picture. All anyone can think about, at least as it pertains to the Dodgers, is what baseball will look like in 2027, if we get any baseball in 2027 at all. In that sense, the 2026 World Series does matter. No doubt the future of the sport depends heavily on the team that wins; considering Tarik Skubal and his $9.5 million in remaining salary cost three decent prospects, you could infer that every single owner wants it to be the Dodgers. For the greater good, you see. If one were conspiracy-minded, one could trace the logical threads from this trade to that conclusion. There are qualifiers on Skubal's performance this year that might justify a lower price—he has had injury trouble and a novel surgical procedure to treat it; though his ERA is still excellent, his peripherals aren't nearly as tidy; he is a rental only through the end of the year—but those qualifiers would be in place at any price, no matter where he went. It is both borderline incomprehensible and self-evidently true that other teams in the rarefied contention window like the Tampa Bay Rays or the Milwaukee Brewers—neither of which, mind you, have ever won a World Series—did not outbid the Dodgers' winning offer, not even for the sake of driving the price higher. It is equally strange that the Detroit Tigers did not shop more rigorously around the league for a higher return.

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Trade Season Kicks Ass Until They Sell Your Beautiful Son

Who is ruining baseball? For me, for today, it's the Washington Nationals. Games played by my home team make up a solid 90 percent of the baseball I watch in a given regular season. Like a lot of baseball fans I was hoping Tarik Skubal would go to the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays instead of to the Dodgers, but in a distant, uncommitted sort of way, the way that I might hope that my friends have favorable weather while they are taking a trip someplace. Skubal's trade destination is firmly not my problem. While the Nationals are playing competitive baseball, I really do not give a rip what the Dodgers are up to. While the Nationals are anywhere near the hunt, I might watch as many as two Dodgers games a month, and the chances are very good that Skubal will not happen to be pitching in any of them. Also, sorry to Detroiters but the Tigers can burn in hell for all I care. The Nationals have had a good season. They were supposed to be bozos in 2026, but instead they have been frisky and fun. They've had the best offense in the majors, and not even in a dreary, optimized, true-outcomes sort of way. Yes, they hit lots of home runs—they are presently first in all the majors in dingers—but they also collect lots of all kinds of knocks (third in total hits) because they put the ball in play a lot (9th best team strikeout percentage). They also lead all of the majors in stolen bases, which just objectively kicks ass. They've had good vibes, and though their pitching has been broadly horrendous, more often than not it has been a good idea to tune in for one of their games. You are likely to see a dinger or two, you're likely to see some action on the bases, you're likely to get some early offense and some late offense. Guys are smiling and bat-flipping and having a great time. The Nationals made it to the second half still right there in the mix for the final National League wild card. New general manager Paul Toboni made comments suggesting that he was going to lean into this unexpected success and try to give the team its best shot at playing into October. When the Nationals traded Curtis Mead to the Boston Red Sox, it was possible to accept this as a kind of fortification: Mead was extremely productive for the Nationals, but they've got plenty of offense and have a desperate need for starting pitching. Connelly Early, the player they received in return, is a perfectly solid starting pitcher who is expected to join the big-league rotation later this month, after completing a rehab stint. Then the Nationals dropped a series to the Blue Jays and lost the first three of a four-game set in Atlanta. For Sunday's finale, against a rookie right-hander, Luis García was suddenly scratched. When Andrés Chaparro took a ball to the noggin and had to come off for a concussion test, and the team needed a healthy first baseman, they turned not to García but to Brady House, who has never played first base in his life. Everyone understood.

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Why Your Team Sucks 2026: New Orleans Saints

_Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far_ here_._ **Your team:** New Orleans Saints. **Your 2025 record:** 6-11, otherwise known as the record of the false dawn. It's a record that _looks_ a lot better than 3-14, until you remember how easy it is for a bad team to scrape together three meaningless wins (or four, or five) at the end of the season, long after everyone else in the league has stopped giving a shit.

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The Crossword, Aug. 3: Lucky Stars

This puzzle was constructed **by Eli Robinson** , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Eli is the Chief Trivia Officer of Water Cooler Trivia. He has far more questions than answers, if you must ask. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. **The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a __ two-month free trial:** "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

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Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign Believes The Many Can Defeat The Money

**DETROIT —** It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, just one week from Election Day, and Abdul El-Sayed’s Detroit office is standing room only. The front and back of the room are packed with volunteers eager to hear the Senate hopeful speak before they go out and canvass the nearby neighborhoods. Many of them are still coming off the high of what they saw as a stellar performance from El-Sayed in the candidate debate that aired the night before. “He was so good, so good,” Lisa, a woman from Grosse Pointe Woods, tells me. While she has previously canvassed for El-Sayed, today she’s brought backup: her son, a college student at Michigan State University who is volunteering for the campaign for the first time. El-Sayed’s campaign has knocked 190,000 doors since he launched his run for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, and in these final days before the election, they’re hoping to drive those numbers up. Every meaningful conversation they’re able to have with an undecided voter could make all the difference come Aug. 4. In the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive with a background in public health, is facing off against Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate congresswoman who has picked up the support of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The money in this race is decidedly not on El-Sayed’s side. Super PACs have spent more than $60 million to support Stevens, with over $30 million of that coming in from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

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Gaelic Football Legend David Hickey Wants War Profiteers Out Of His Sport

**DUBLIN —** David Hickey was built for Gaelic football, the sport that can’t stick to sports. Hickey, who was a two-time GAA all-star and four-time All-Ireland winner as a half-forward for Dublin, used football’s biggest weekend as a platform for protests. First, Hickey loudly refused to show up for a so-called Legends Lunch at storied Croke Park on July 24, where he was to be honored alongside other members of the Dubs’ 1976 championship side. Hickey’s boycott was aimed at the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), the event’s organizer and primary football player advocacy group, for what he called its “failure to take a stance” against Allianz, a Germany-based insurance giant with a fetish for profiting from crimes against humanity. The transnational underwriter has been the preeminent sponsor of Irish games, hurling and football, since 1993, when it acquired naming rights for the national leagues in both sports. Allianz also invested billions of dollars in Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza. “I do not want the memory of that team associated in any way with the GPA, who have failed miserably to stand up for anything worthwhile apart from money,” said Hickey, who became Ireland’s leading transplant surgeon and a high-profile social activist after leaving the game.

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Kelsey Plum Is Back At The Center Of A Head-Scratching Trade

_Weird trade. They must think they can re-sign her._ This is more or less what I said before the 2025 season, when the Los Angeles Sparks traded for a year of Kelsey Plum. In a three-team deal that also sent Jewell Loyd to Las Vegas, the Sparks gave up the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft to Loyd’s former team, Seattle. Plum was the best player in that deal, and in Los Angeles, she did kind of prove what she wanted to when she sought an opportunity to lead her own team, out from the shadow of A’ja Wilson. In the 12 games she played this year before she went down with a leg injury, Plum was averaging close to 24 points per game and putting up some outrageous paint scoring numbers with her rim pressure. The problems become visible with additional context: The undersized Plum certainly didn’t help, but last year’s Sparks defense was hopelessly bad, and this year’s retooled roster with reinforcements Nneka Ogwumike and Ariel Atkins hasn’t done the trick either. Late Saturday night, after a few days of rumbling that Plum wanted out, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the 10-17 Sparks were trading Plum to the 11-19 Phoenix Mercury. Weird trade? They must think they can re-sign her?__ The Mercury are sending over a 2027 first-round pick, solid rotation guard Monique Akoa Makani, and a 2028 second-round pick. The weirdness this time owes to Phoenix’s place in the standings, which was half a game below Los Angeles at the time the trade was reported. Usually, a deadline buyer does not have a worse record than the deadline seller they patronize. The Mercury have always had a funky roster, and injuries made their thin rotation even thinner, so their 2026 season has been a real disappointment following last year’s Finals run. Kahleah Copper has played better after a brutal shooting start to the season, but as of deadline day on Sunday, the Mercury still sit 12th in the WNBA standings and a full six games back of New York for the final playoff spot with 14 games left. You could read a bit of euphemism in Charania’s post about the news: “Plum, a two-time WNBA champion, and the Mercury have shared excitement about the future in Phoenix.” Maybe that meant Plum and Phoenix had some understanding about her staying there long-term. The Mercury have a habit of trading away picks for star players, a habit they can sustain because of their resources to attract free agents and their international scouting wins. But The Athletic’s Annie Costabile reported on Sunday morning that Plum “still intends to go through free agency,” which would make her a fairly expensive rental for a team with an already-poor defense and very little hope of making the playoffs. When the Sparks first traded for her, ESPN reported that Plum “hopes to stay with the Sparks beyond 2025.” Technically she did, though L.A.’s hope was probably that she’d stay with them a little longer.

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Sydney Taylor Is The Undrafted Rookie Making Sky Games Fun

The “heartbreaking endings to 2026 Chicago Sky games” montage that CBS showed in the final minute of the Sky’s Saturday matinee against the Las Vegas Aces hinted at how this game might unfold. One of the endings was from a game against the New York Liberty in late June, the same game 25-year-old undrafted rookie Sydney Taylor debuted in Chicago’s starting lineup. On the possession after Taylor hit a go-ahead three with 15 seconds left, the Sky let Sabrina Ionescu waltz to the rim for a layup to give New York the lead back, and Taylor’s next shot at the buzzer fell short. Her teammates had to peel her off the floor, where she sat in tears. Team minority owner Dwyane Wade, sitting courtside, came over and leaned down to pat her shoulder. Taylor called it a “tough feeling” after that game. “But if you’re willing to take those shots, you’ve got to be willing to live with the result.” Fifteen games later, Taylor is the number-one option still taking those shots, and Saturday’s was a happier result to live with. A’ja Wilson’s much-too-easy go-ahead layup with three seconds left seemed destined for the Sky heartbreak montage. But on the next play, Taylor shook off Jackie Young (with the help of another screen from Elizabeth Williams) and hit the game-winning three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMiElP7QzD4 Chelsea Gray’s half-court heave, also unnervingly close to a place in the Sky heartbreak montage, would not have counted anyway.

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By Bunt Or By Blast, The Red Sox Keep Winning

The Boston Red Sox enjoyed a 15-game win streak that vaulted them back into the playoff picture last month, and they've stayed upright in the days since. Holding a four-game edge over the third and final wild card slot, Boston's preserved their flame with a series of games in which they've simply, pardon the cliché, found a way to get the victory. Whether they're smashing the ball over the fence or knocking it just a few feet beyond home plate, the Red Sox are proving very tough to handle. The active win streak at the moment is four games, and the first of the quartet was an extra-inning triumph at the Athletics' temporary ballpark, where Andruw Monasterio launched a two-run shot into orbit in the top of the 10th to deliver a 4-2 final. In Thursday's game, the Sox were down 4-3 in the eighth, but the demolition duo of Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras hit back-to-back solo dingers to take the lead, each of them feasting upon some juicy off-speed stuff as they sent Luis Medina's offerings to deep center field. Usually, when a team is winning as often as the Sox are, the clubhouse is happy and everybody's getting along. But Jarren Duran's remained a bit touchy. The man who was an All-Star outfielder two seasons ago and still put up 3.9 fWAR in a comparatively disappointing 2025 has been struggling through a brutal campaign where he's been unable to keep his average above .200. On Thursday, Duran shouted at Willson Contreras when Contreras didn't tag and score from third on a shallow fly ball Duran hit to left. Contreras downplayed the incident in the postgame, but Duran announced his feelings loud and clear.

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The Dodgers Got Tarik Skubal

If Shohei Ohtani doesn't return to the pitcher's mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, they've got themselves a hell of a replacement. Late Saturday night, the back-to-back defending world champions made the biggest trade deadline move possible, acquiring back-to-back AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for three prospects. This trade helps a strong team grow even stronger, and their 10-game lead in the NL West already makes the Dodgers the presumptive winners of that division yet again. If their starting rotation was looking a little thin with the injuries to Ohtani, Blake Snell, and Tyler Glasnow, it doesn't anymore. The thrill of imagining Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting the first two games of a playoff series is exactly the feeling that contending teams should want to spark in their fans when they bring on a new guy at the deadline. While MLB continues its campaign to get people mad at the Dodgers for spending money and winning, a half-season of Skubal's services was clearly within the budget of the league's other franchises, too—even the ones that keep payrolls low. The Dodgers will spend $9.5 million on his contract before he enters free agency, and they haven't parted with any irreplaceable players. From this deal, the Tigers will add a pretty obscure single-A hurler; a 27-year-old pitcher in AAA named River Ryan that some folks seem to like; and, the best of the bunch according to MLB Pipeline, 21-year-old AA outfielder Zyhir Hope.

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Who Was The Most Unsettlingly Tan Coach At Preseason Media Days?

There is a particularly unpleasant image of Brian Daboll that I return to in my mind from time to time. You can see it in the 2024 Why Your Team Sucks entry for the New York Giants; the image in that story is a photo of my TV, from an episode in the team's turn as the subject of that season of the HBO series _Hard Knocks_. Subtitles show that Daboll is saying "That guy's a stud on tape," a likely enough thing for Brian Daboll to say, but what is more notable about the image is that Daboll's lavishly bald head is the color of a ripe raspberry. I took the photo because the shade was so upsetting that I didn't know what else to do. Discretely contact the sunburn police? Mail some ointments to the team offices? Alert Sid Rosenberg? Even for the decently large cohort of football coaches with more hair and sense than Daboll, this sort of thing is a hazard. These are men who spend a lot of time outside in the sun, squinting and clapping and saying things like "That guy's a stud on tape" to each other. That is the job, more or less. College coaches also have to do all that while also spending countless offseason hours golfing and backslapping and confidentially saying things like "That guy's a stud on tape" to the local gentry types who keep their college football programs and NIL funds flush. They do this so that those rich guys will have something to take back to their car dealerships and litigation concerns, but also because those are just the folkways and mores of this community. This is not the only American micro-economy that runs on a bunch of guys who look like they're made out of the same stuff Twizzlers are made out of, giving each other money and gossiping about each other behind their backs, but it might be the one that is least concerned with sunblock. There absolutely are thousands of TikTok casualties in this great land who have worked themselves around to the belief that sunblock is the public-facing part of some longstanding elite conspiracy, and some of them surely coach football. But for all the donkeys whose phones convinced them that the Bilderberg Group wants you to get melanoma, which is not real but can be treated with the right kind of supplements, there are many more guys who simply do not avail themselves of any kind of protection from the sun because that's something their wives do or just that their wives ask them to do, or because doing so feels too much like an act of submission either to those wives or to the ultraviolet rays of the sun.

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Can A Monkey Have A Pet?

In the spring of 2004, researchers monitoring a population of wild bearded capuchins in a Brazilian woodland saw an infant clinging to Chiquinha, one of the adult female monkeys. The baby was not a capuchin but a marmoset—a much smaller monkey species. The researchers dubbed the infant Fortunata. Chiquinha became Fortunata's primary caretaker until the following summer, when she fell pregnant and another capuchin female, Dendê, began mothering the marmoset. Fortunata behaved like any other capuchin in the group and was raised with the same level of care as a capuchin infant. Fortunata traveled and foraged with the monkeys, responded to their alarm calls, and even helped the group mob a snake. When the young capuchins played with the much smaller marmoset, they adjusted their strength to ensure they wouldn't hurt the smaller monkey. Fortunata eventually vanished the following spring, when the marmoset was almost an adult. The researchers who observed Fortunata described the marmoset's childhood as a kind of adoption in a 2006 paper in the _American Journal of Primatology._ The marmoset, after all, was taken in as an infant and raised by two different mothers. Although monkey adoption is common in captivity, it most often occurs between monkeys of the same species, and occasionally within the same genus. Fortunata the marmoset was clearly a very different kind of monkey, unable to leap from tree to tree or crack nuts like the others. And yet not one, but two capuchins cared for Fortunata as if it were their own child. For a long time, humans have considered ourselves unique in our penchant for forming close social relationships with animals of other species. (I say social relationships to exclude other longterm relationship models, such as the parasitic partnership that can exist between a whale and her tapeworm.) But a new review paper published in the journal _Primates_ suggests that human pet-keeping has deeper evolutionary roots among primates.

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Tony Romo On Leave From CBS After Drunk Driving Arrest

On Friday, CBS Sports announced that NFL analyst Tony Romo is on leave "until further notice," following his arrest in Milwaukee last week for operating while intoxicated. https://twitter.com/adamschefter/status/2083211920094466188?s=46 Romo was given three citations from the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office after a traffic stop on July 23, when police spotted him driving on the highway, passing cars in a lane he shouldn't have been in. In the bodycam footage of the arrest, a glassy-eyed Romo can be seen failing field sobriety tests, despite him treating them like he was at the combine or something. He refused a breathalyzer, though an open container of alcohol was found inside his car, according to police. Romo has a court appearance scheduled for Sept. 21.

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Kody Clemens Achieves The Ultimate Ultimate Grand Slam

Some time ago, if you asked me for an example of the most romantic, childhood dream–ass achievement for a baseball player, I probably would have pointed to Bryson Stott's home run against the Miami Marlins in the 2023 NL Wild Card series: a first-pitch grand slam with the crowd singing his walk-up song. But if we're being objective, there are a few flaws with the moment. The Philly crowd was singing, but it wasn't a game-winning grand slam, even if it was the dagger. The Phillies were already up three runs. This moment was surely romantic, but maybe the question should be reframed: What would be the most mathematically comprehensive achievement for a baseball player? The ultimate grand slam is one answer. It's not just a walk-off grand slam, but a perfectly precise one, with the trailing team down three runs in the bottom of the deciding inning, and the grand slam providing no more runs than needed to lead to instant victory. The definition of an ultimate grand slam came up recently, on June 10, when Bryce Eldridge of the San Francisco Giants hit one with no one out in the bottom of the ninth, sealing an 11-10 win over the Washington Nationals. Depending on how you count it, he became the 33rd or 32nd player to ever achieve the feat. Stathead has 31 players before Eldridge. However, the MLB.com SEO post for every ultimate grand slam in Major League history has 32 before him. The difference between the statistics is Roberto Clemente's inside-the-parker in 1956 against the Chicago Cubs. (That MLB.com post has been regularly updated since 2019, and for the past few versions has kept the lede as "It's never over until it's over -- just ask the [last team to hit an ultimate grand slam].") On Thursday, Kody Clemens of the Minnesota Twins offered an even more improbable grand slam—an ultimate ultimate grand slam, one might say. With the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth against the Kansas City Royals, Clemens came up to bat with two outs and found himself quickly down in an 0-2 count. Then, as Royals pitcher Matt Strahm left a 83-mph slider in the zone, Clemens ripped it to right-center field for the first-ever ultimate grand slam on an 0-2 count. (To be comprehensive, the counts of several earlier grand slams are unknown on Stathead, and there were three other ultimate grand slams that took place on two strikes and two outs.) The moment was about as romantic as a regular-season game against the Kansas City Royals can be.

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Reports: Harrison Bader A Dope

We’ve all been there. We’ve all done something so incredibly stupid that we wish the Earth were flat so we could walk off the face of it. We’ve all thought to ourselves, _I hope nobody saw that_ , only to turn around and see that yes everybody saw that and oh god now the police are involved and I have to go to the hospital and I sure do hope the Major League Baseball team I work for doesn't spend any time looking into how I got this season-ending injury. It's all so relatable. On Tuesday, the Giants reported that center fielder Harrison Bader, already out for two months with plantar fasciitis, had aggravated the injury in a “scooter accident” over the weekend. While the team did not elaborate on the alleged mishap, SFist reported that witnesses saw Bader rear-end a fire engine with his scooter, which resulted in the truck's wheel running over his already injured foot. In a statement to SFist, the SFPD confirmed "a vehicle collision involving a scooter," and that "the individual was transported to a local hospital for non-life threatening injuries." Witnesses described seeing Bader drinking at bars across San Francisco the night of the big whoopsie, suggesting that perhaps this was not a sober scootering snafu. One of those bars was Balboa Cafe, where witnesses spotted him leaving right before the collision. The San Francisco Standard confirmed that the collision took place outside a fire station a few doors down from the cafe. They also reported that manager Tony Vitello is _not_ a fan of scooters, which may be why Bader has not been cooperating with the Giants' investigation. Perhaps the Giants should have known what they signed up for when they acquired Bader. If his 19-game college suspension in 2014 indicates anything, it's that this man loves a scooter, a drink, and the wind whipping through his hair.

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Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Washington Commanders

_Some people are fans of the Washington Commanders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Commanders. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far_ here_._ **Your team:** Washington Comma—OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN https://twitter.com/ChadwikoTWW/status/1985195970687373778

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Tom Dundon’s Shameless Minions Expand The Scope Of His War On Portland

Fans of the Portland Trail Blazers should prepare themselves for a very unpleasant time. Tom Dundon, the team's new owner, is digging in. Arena renovations would improve the value of his property, and so he wants arena renovations. He is simply and resolutely refusing to commit any of his own money to the project. If Portland refuses to pay for stadium renovations, and the stadium thus goes un-renovated, Dundon will have an ironclad pretext for packing the team into a U-Haul and moving it to Las Vegas, or Nashville, or—the monkey's paw finally directing a shriveled middle finger at the world—Seattle. That's how investor ownership works, and why it is fucked: The franchise has been in Portland for almost 60 years; Dundon bought it four months ago, and it is entirely and irrevocably _his_. Dundon dispatched a delegation of bottom-feeding deputies to Portland City Hall on Thursday, for the purpose of keeping the pressure on civic leaders. Those vile underlings, pressing a more aggressive line of attack, used the occasion to assert that Portland is too woke and broke, at present, to function as the host city of an NBA basketball team, per reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Dundon is demanding that Portland pay $120 million up front for renovations, and to earmark another $275 million for continuing maintenance. The city, in return, wants a 20-year lease, the Blazers to pay a $3 million annual fee in exchange for the property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena, and for Dundon to commit to using unionized labor. For the sin of presenting these terms to the Blazers, the city is forced to sit there and listen to Dundon's proxies spit Fox News hysteria at a public meeting.

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AI Listings Have Made Apartment Hunting Even More Debasing

I started reading _Valley of the Dolls_ for the first time the other night. It opens in 1945, with Anne Welles landing in New York and securing a job as a secretary at Henry Bellamy’s theatrical agency. She’s been tasked with finding an apartment for Henry’s handsome business partner, something on the East Side with a living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen, furnished, for around $150 per month. He tells her not to come back to work until she’s found something. “Henry,” his handsome business partner warns, “we may never see this girl again.” That’s as far as I made it before closing the book and bathing my face in the blue light of my laptop, my left eye twitching as I refreshed Craigslist for the hundredth time that day. I, too, have been tasked with finding an apartment in the city—not by my boss but by my current landlord, who, after mismanaging a bedbug scare for the past six months, is raising our rent by nearly $1,000. For the three years I have lived in this building, she has done little more than collect rent and turn a page a day in the picture book about dogs she has displayed in the mail room. So: looking for something in Central Brooklyn with a living room, bath, and kitchen, unfurnished, with fewer than 1,000 open housing code violations. Should an apartment meet these rigorous qualifications, there’s no choice but to move on it immediately. The city’s rental vacancy rate is 1.41 percent. If you don’t drop what you’re doing and beg, you will get left behind. My recent iMessage history looks something like: “Can I apply now? Can I see it RIGHT NOW? Can you draw up a lease? Can I give you everything? Can I give you all that’s in my bank account as a security deposit? Sir? Mr. Agent sir? I am a quiet and respectful tenant who spends most evenings cleaning my floors with a wood-and-bristle scrub while cartoonishly large bubbles float above me to the ceiling Cinderella style!!!!” Concrete jungle where dreams are maaaaaaaade of.

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That’s Too Much Helicopter

There are the very special episodes that Drew and I do before heading off on vacation, and then there are the rarer ones we do while one of us is _on_ vacation. This week's installment was one of those, as Drew joined from a beach house in an undisclosed—well, he mentions it within the first two minutes, but I won't disclose it here—New England location and I joined from my damn apartment, albeit not long after returning from my extremely disclosed annual summer trip to Maine. And yet this is only sort of a Vacation Episode, because while Drew was within hailing distance of a beach and I could still see my own time away receding in the rearview mirror, the news cycle was not on vacation. After some talk about regional accents good and bad, complete with regional accent work of our own, we were on to the stuff that's happening. Regarding the NFL, we're still in the part of Why Your Team Sucks when all the teams actually do suck. But it was a treat to talk about the LeBron-Sixers situation for the first time in a conversation that included cautious optimism, a reckless invocation of the infamous Sports Illustrated "Now This Is Going To Be Fun" cover, and a frank disagreement about whether the Eastern Conference is actually as thin as Drew believes it to be. Decently substantive, but at the end also decently vacation-scented, as we drifted into a critique of LeBron's proposed helicopter commute, the perversity of Amtrak commuting as a concept and the apparently perverse way in which I say "Acela," and the many ways to commute like an idiot and go insane as a result. Also, there's some stuff about my experience writing an unpublishable novel on Amtrak in my twenties, which was pretty good as those things go.

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Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Cleveland Browns

_Some people are fans of the Cleveland Browns. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cleveland Browns. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far_ here_._ **Your team:** Cleveland Browns. https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mqpa4rnsfs2h

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UEFA Is Ready To Go To War With FIFA Over The World Cup

UEFA, Europe's soccer confederation, confirmed on Thursday that it was not making empty threats over FIFA president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell the World Cup off to private investors. In a statement titled "Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 national associations" posted on the confederation's website, UEFA laid down the gauntlet, using its immense power and money to—it hopes—block Infantino's latest greedy, stupid idea. The key part of the statement reads as follows: > Europe’s position is clear. We will never lend this model our legitimacy. No one has the moral authority to sell what they merely hold in trust for the next generation. > > As a result of today’s discussion, no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership. > > Nobody should be in any doubt: UEFA and its national associations will oppose these plans with absolute determination.

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Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove—some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador budgeted $2 million for the job, which was taken up by a local engineering firm and is expected to be completed in October. As workers cut open the vats, viscous brown fish goo shot out onto the factory floor. It will be mixed with peat moss, hauled out in about 200 truckloads, and thrown in a landfill lined with polyethylene, after which it will be sealed up "like a Ziploc," according to the lead engineer on the project. St. Mary's Mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up while describing new hope. "To be known as the 'sauce plant mayor' … it's time for that to be over," he said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn8KEpRqD1Y

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Baseball’s Labor History Is Repeating Itself Once Again

Major League Baseball's upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don't. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a third of the league's teams keep forgetting to try, so on—is both true enough and primarily noise made for the sake of making noise. Every CBA negotiation is at least a little bit like this. The question of “Which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against J.H. Blair, here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course. It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company Energy Transfer owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants owner Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of J.H. Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.

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