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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 "this 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 "this 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 "this guy's a stud on tape" to the local gentry types that 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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