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When I first saw the press release announcing that scientists had harvested yeast from the remains of Ötzi the 5,000-year-old iceman and used it to make a sourdough bread, I admit I was not terribly moved. The announcement smelled like a publicity stunt designed to get Ötzi back in the headlines—as if he does not get enough coverage as is! Ötzi the iceman makes the news more than any other 5,000-year-old person, given each new horrible clinical diagnosis scientists make after analyzing his mummified body with newer and newer technology. Of course Ötzi not the only person we know of from around that time. There is Ginger, the man whose body was naturally preserved in the hot, dry sands of Gebelein in Egypt more than 5,000 years ago. There is the 4,000-year-old Cashel Man who appears to have been violently sacrificed in a bog. But have you heard of Ginger? Have you heard of the Cashel Man? No. You have only heard of Ötzi. I do not mean this as a slight against the iceman. Rather, I mean to suggest that he makes headlines on his own terms, by which I mean the fact that his body is a Pandora's box of medical maladies. Ötzi has never needed to become bread to go viral. As such, I was prepared to close the tab spreading the good word of Ötzi's yeasts. But then I saw the publicity photo the researchers had chosen to accompany this paper, which was published in Microbiome, a paper that found four cold-adapted yeasts that survived in the sub-zero temperatures of the iceman's tummy. The photo was, to me, even more shocking than the revelation of the yeasts. It was a crisp close-up of the iceman's glossy feet.

If OG Anunoby's miraculous put-back of Jalen Brunson's long three is the Hand of God, maybe the play before it was the Brain of Squirrel. It was Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, currently finishing up his ninth year in the NBA, who made a pre-rookie mistake that allowed the Knicks the chance to take the 3-1 series lead. With under 20 seconds to go and the Spurs up one, a Brunson drive to the hoop led to a loose ball off the backboard. It was Fox, heroically, who tipped the ball past the last Knicks defender and chased it down in the Spurs' end. Basketball convention dictates that you play it safe and wait to be fouled, to take more time off the clock and go to the line to extend the lead. However, Fox decided that the layup would be more automatic than the free throws, and Anunoby made a play that you can add to the list of legendary NBA Finals blocks. No foul, no points, Knicks ball. “I just thought I’d be able to outrun him,” the 28-year-old Fox said after the game. “That’s it.”

The World Cup is great for surfacing fun facts. Here's one that might shock your ears as you watch Bosnia-Herzegovina play its first group-stage game on Friday: The team's coach, Sergej Barbarez, is 54 years old and working his first job as a manager. Also, he was most recently a professional poker player. Don't worry, Barbarez does actually know a thing or two about soccer. He played professionally for 14 years, and was no slouch. He spent most of his professional career in the Bundesliga, where he scored 105 goals in 377 appearances. From 2004 to 2006, he was captain of Bosnia-Herzegovina's national team, and acquired his coaching license a few years after retiring in 2008. That's around when he started playing cards professionally. According to Cardplayer.com, between 2010 and 2022 he won $143,628 in 26 games. He doesn't have any recorded tournament wins, but he did make it to two final tables in the World Series of Poker. Throughout his time as a poker player, Barbarez enjoyed something approaching national icon status, and remained an outspoken critic of the Football Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina's governance decisions.  In 2021, Vico Zeljkovic became president of the association and helped throw the team into chaos. Zeljkovic oversaw a rapid succession of managers, three of whom were hired and fired months apart as the team failed to qualify for the 2024 Euros. Fans criticized the FA's leadership, including the 2022 decision to schedule friendlies with Russia right after it had invaded Ukraine and was banned FIFA and UEFA competitions. One of the loudest critics of the FA was Barbarez, so it was something of a shock when he was announced as the national team manager.

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Nobody fell in love with France this year, for the same reason nobody fell in love with France in 2022 or 2018. Under Didier Deschamps, the football manager most likely to make you think of Jerry Sloan, the French are deep in flair but play as though every goal they surrender results in the death of a puppy. Deschamps is best described as an "arch-pragmatist," which is the polite way of saying, "He doesn't celebrate his own birthday so don't expect him to celebrate yours."

Consider the perspective of the soccer goalkeeper. Turn the game 90 degrees from how you watch it at home, and observe as the best part of it—your team attacking in the final third—recedes away from you. The players are small, the action muddled. Should your team score, you celebrate alone, distant. When the opponent attacks, the game rushes forward into sudden full-scale focus.  The kind of person who chooses this existence—yelling at their teammates, staving off disaster, parrying for a living—has internal wiring that does not come from the Regular Human Factory. They are different from you and me, and different also from their teammates in the field. They grew up loving the beautiful game, and ultimately their abilities and affinities and long limbs placed them in a photo-negative version of the sport. Or in some cases, more worryingly, they were simply Always Like That. Oh, I love them! I love these sickos.  It is important that I establish my goalie-watching bona fides, because I am here to tell you that in 2026 there are only two kinds of quality goalkeepers at the top of the men's game: OCD Super Soldiers and Shifty Greaseballs. From the titles alone, you might already see them: Manuel Neuer, the square-jawed, square-shouldered Teuton who anchored Champions League and World Cup–winning teams, is the ur–OCD Super Soldier. Gianluigi Buffon, the lynchpin of a defensive-minded World Cup champion back when Italy made it to World Cups, is the ultimate Shifty Greaseball. (Please note: I am not diagnosing an entire class of goalkeeper with obsessive-compulsive disorder; I merely lack a better adjective for the Super Soldier's reflexive and repetitive organization of his defenders.)

With 104 games over the next six weeks, and with the United States (along with Canada and Mexico) hosting, the World Cup will be all-encompassing for the near future. Soccer is a very easy sport to get drawn into, especially during a World Cup, but the complexity of the game lives below the surface. Sure, you can enter the tournament with minimal knowledge and still appreciate the appeal of a well-hit ball that flies into the top corner, but my hope is that I can break down some of the intricacies of soccer a little, in order to give you a head start on impressing the half-drunk hooligans you might encounter at your local watering hole between now and the final on July 19. Worst case, this guide will serve as an ode to one specific USMNT player I have been a fan of for years, and that feels worth it to me right there. There's a famous quote, almost certainly apocryphal, about former Spain and Barcelona midfielder Sergio Busquets that will be helpful here. Supposedly said by World Cup–winning Spanish manager Vicente del Bosque, it goes like this: "If you watch the game, you don't see Busquets. But if you watch Busquets, you see the whole game." It's a little pat, and again almost definitely did not originate from Del Bosque himself, but it still gets at a truth about soccer, which is that most of what's important in the game happens away from the ball. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to what I will call the Busquets Method, a way to understand what happens and why by looking away from where your eye is most naturally drawn.

Some games get you thinking about a higher power. Not because it seems like some cosmic force has put a thumb on the scale in favor of one side or the other, but because the game in question produces a result so unlikely, so ornately designed, that it can only have occurred exactly as it did. Game 4 of the NBA Finals has me feeling like one of those Kansas creationists who point to a bacterial flagellum and start shouting about the presence of God in the creation of life. How else could something this unlikely, this beautiful, this fate-altering have happened? The Knicks won, 107-106, after erasing a 29-point deficit. They were down 76-49 at halftime. They trailed by 20 with 9:33 to play in the fourth quarter. How? How? How? The Knicks' performance in the first half was just as strange and stultifying as their second half was miraculous. An ill omen seemed to have wrapped itself around Madison Square Garden when Karl-Anthony Towns picked up his second foul—the result of an incredibly bold challenge by Spurs coach Mitch Johnson—barely a minute into the game. The Knicks' success in this series has felt inextricably linked with Towns's ability to stay focused and on the floor, as he's their best defensive matchup for Victor Wembanyama and their most efficient offensive hub, and here he had been removed from the game basically before it started.

"Accept it. Accept it. It’s an uncontrollable. You cannot change it. Get over it. Get on with it." Emma Hayes's words may have aspired to equanimity, but her tone betrayed her. Coming off a 2-1 loss to Brazil in São Paolo—the first of two consecutive friendlies played on the Brazilians' turf—the U.S. Women's National Team coach kept coming back to her refrain: the raucous crowds, their opponent's physicality, the officials' (in)competence, and the late start time for Tuesday's match were things the U.S. couldn't control, so best not to dwell on them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cPuocsk9BI

The screwworms are here, as we predicted they would be. More than half a century after the parasitic pest was declared eradicated, the insects have escaped containment in South America and made it all the way to Texas, where they have not been seen since 1966. There are now five cases of the flesh-eating parasite in the United States, all confirmed in under a week. The first two were in calves in Zavala County, followed soon after by a calf in La Salle County; a goat in Gillespie County; and a dog that lives in Lea County, N.M., but recently traveled through Texas. These five cases are alarming but expected, as Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins tweeted. On this fact, Rollins is correct. But expected is different from inevitable. The screwworm's arrival was expected because over the past few years the insects have been wriggling toward our border with Mexico, somehow surging past the boundary of Panama's Darién Gap. This boundary was enforced by the Sterile Insect Technique, in which hordes of engineered and irradiated sterile males kept the flies at bay. Rollins blamed the screwworm's reappearance on "the open-border policies of the last administration," which is incorrect and obviously racist. There is no evidence that human migration has helped the screwworm's sprawl. If there is blame to assign, it should be directed at the Trump administration, which helped pave the screwworm's path up north. The DOGE cuts in the spring of 2025 terminated USAID funding for a program that monitored and contained the screwworm in Central America and USDA funding that supported screwworm outbreak investigations and responses in 22 countries. After Joe Biden closed southern ports of entry to live cattle from Mexico to box out the screwworm in 2024, Donald Trump reopened those ports in February 2025. (The ports were closed again later that May.) The New World screwworm is a maggot, specifically the larvae of a parasitic blowfly that feeds on warm-blooded animals. But while most maggots feed on dead flesh, the screwworm only feeds on fresh wounds. So while other flies are content with carcasses, dung, and things of that nature, screwworms often seek out broken skin on living animals. But they'll also, horribly, lay their eggs on mucous membranes, including eyes, lips, or even an anus or vagina. Females lay their eggs inside the open flesh, eggs that hatch into larvae that gnaw and burrow into their host's skin.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Ray answers a question about best practices in being a grandparent.