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Norway's charmed and charming run to the World Cup quarterfinals has been a good time all around. Erling Haaland is probably the most lovingly memed man on Earth at the moment, and with good reason. The Norwegians are getting really into cowboy fashion. It's all very fun. They seem like a fun hang. And they are rowing. They are rowing after wins. They are rowing in Times Square. They are rowing up the escalator. The Viking Row is the breakout celebration of this Cup, with supporters joining the team after victories in a metronomic pantomime of their ancestors crossing the storm-toss'd seas, possibly to raid some abbey or other. But after Norway's victory over Senegal in the group stage, a photo went viral showing one lone Norway fan refusing to put his back into the oar. Emil Anners Lappen refuses to row! He simply will not. In the silly season of World Cup human interest stories, this has made Emil famous. The news is covering him in his home country. They're covering him in Sweden. And now, ahead of England's final-eight match against Norway, Emil has finally been interviewed in English, by Sky News. https://twitter.com/skynews/status/2075338675114684690

GAVARNIE-GÉDRE, France — Millions of people travel to the Tour de France every year, almost all of them on purpose. This is the story of three people who did so by accident. While waiting for the riders to make their way up to Gavarnie-Gédre for the finish of Stage 6, I took a little stroll out to see the Cirque du Gavarnie. The beautiful glacial amphitheater houses the tallest waterfall in mainland France, and the final climb of Thursday's racing made up for its unselective profile by at least finishing in an incredible atmosphere. After taking a little cool-off dip in a crisp stream made pearlescent by eroded minerals, I spotted three people who definitely didn't belong. Antonio, Teresana, and Federico were decked out in backpacking gear, talking to a local official, and displaying the universal body language of people who have found themselves in a Bit Of A Situation. I knew I had to talk to these guys. They seemed fun, and like they had a story. Both turned out to be correct.

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have a balcony makeover, thoughts on washable rugs, and a plea to please, please not use contact paper on your countertops! Jessica asks: By NYC standards my balcony is HUGE (11' x 5') but I can't seem to make the layout quite work. The two most important things to me are being able to lounge comfortably, and also have a table/chairs for two.  I have a small couch with ottomans and also a gravity chair. Neither are super comfortable to be honest. I like being able to easily move the couch around—at one point I had it against the door instead of under the window—but it's not quite big enough all around to really relax in. The gravity chair is pretty swagless, which I wouldn't mind except it's also not as comfortable as it looked on the website.  I also end up with a lot of dead space in the middle (currently filled by the gravity chair, but I'm thinking of getting rid of the whole setup). Is there an obvious seating arrangement that I'm missing? Should I consider two lounge chairs instead of the couch? The door next to the couch isn't used—the actual entrance is the sliding glass door next to the table.

In September 2025 the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the Los Angeles Clippers for potential salary cap circumvention after Pablo Torre Finds Out reported that the team had arranged a no-show endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a fraudulent tree-planting company called Aspiration. On June 30, 2026, the Clippers agreed to trade Leonard to the Toronto Raptors. That trade is now on hold because, somehow, the aforementioned investigation is still ongoing. On Thursday both the Clippers and Raptors released statements saying their trade is being put on pause. The Raptors' statement said that the reason for the delay is that the NBA informed them that they would "assume the risk of any potential outcome of the investigation impacting Kawhi." This is an interesting development for a few reasons, the first being that the NBA's warning to the Raptors would seem to indicate that a suspension might be coming Leonard's way before the start of the season. The other reason is that it really makes you wonder what the fuck Adam Silver is doing every day. The Aspiration investigation has been going on for nearly a year at this point, and it has dragged on for so long that it is now fucking up the offseason for teams that had nothing to do with it. The Raptors were well into a summer making plans to go into next season with a team built around Leonard, and now they are stuck waiting around to see if they will A) have to cancel that trade and change their plans on the fly or B) trade for a player who is going to miss a significant number of games. Why couldn't the NBA have tipped the Raptors off about this 10 days ago, when the trade was first reported? For that matter, why didn't the league just issue a warning to all teams about Leonard's status at the beginning of the summer, to prevent an awkward situation like this one? What are Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick, the two players Toronto wanted to send to Los Angeles in the trade, supposed to do now? These guys need to figure out where they are going to be living and working for the season.

World Cups are rarely wire-to-wire coronations. In fact, the competition is so fierce, and the margins so small, that usually there isn't a single clear "best" team that goes ahead and wins it all. In 2010, you could argue that Germany looked stronger than eventual champions Spain, up until the Spaniards pulled off a narrow 1-0 win against them in the semifinal. The Dutch were probably the strongest team overall in 2014, even though they fell to Argentina in the semis. As the legendary final itself demonstrated, there wasn't terribly much separating France from Argentina in 2022 either. Really, of the most recent four tournaments, only France in 2018 looked like the best team throughout the competition and then confirmed that sense by winning. It's no surprise, then, that the French appear to be on the verge of pulling off that same feat again, coming off a 2-0 domination of Morocco in Thursday's quarterfinal that once again had Les Bleus seeming unstoppable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mx7L_IgBfY This has been, more than anything, a World Cup of stars. Lionel Messi has been astonishing for Argentina, Erling Haaland has Norway one game from the semis on the sheer power of his goalscoring, and Harry Kane stands in Norway's path as England's best player (and if it's not him, it's Jude Bellingham, another star playing up to his maximum level). France's strength is that it is the only team that can boast a roster full of stars, one in which no one player is needed to win. Of course, France does have a leading star in Kylian Mbappé, but it also has Michael Olise, and Ousmane Dembélé, and Désiré Doué, and William Saliba, and Dayot Upamecano, and Bradley Barcola off the bench. Not all of those players are stars by definition, but they are all so talented that it's impossible to focus on one player in order to shut down France.

Nervy tennis is so rich. It can contain both the worst of the sport (in a technical sense) and the best of it (in a narrative sense). You can witness breakdowns in routine strokes, diseased shot selection, and facial expressions that indicate a horrible geyser of bile into the esophagus. But you'll also see the bravery of a player who is flagging, hurting, and still playing gorgeous tennis from a land beyond conscious thought. Rarely will there be tennis nervier than the third-set tiebreak that decided Thursday's Wimbledon semifinal between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova, and would have advanced either player into her first final at the tournament. The two women had traded the first two sets, each won with roughly equivalent ease, and danced cagily all the way to 6-6 in the third. Between points, Muchova clutched at her right side with a wince; in press afterward she diagnosed it as a stitch, said she "couldn't catch a breath," and was trying to massage it away. Despite coming out flat, Gauff elbowed her way back into the match with her usual stamina, opportunism, and guile; she looked fresher going into the deciding frame. They proceeded to play 22 points so entertaining, with career-defining chances earned and squandered by both players, that I had to run back the tiebreak as soon as it ended in Muchova's favor. Why not do it together? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpl9mApl2Tw

Terry Thompson is part of a lawsuit against FanDuel and DraftKings, claiming that the sports books used their VIP services and products to intentionally prey on his gambling addiction. Thompson says he wagered $18.5 million with FanDuel and became addicted to gambling via the sports book's in-game micro bets. His suit claims he was also encouraged to continue gambling by a FanDuel VIP manager named Bryttanni Morgan, who at one point sent Thompson a personalized video from Phillies star Bryce Harper. The 21-second video, obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer, features Harper speaking into his phone camera and wishing Thompson a happy Thanksgiving. "Your host Bryttanni, from FanDuel, wanted to make sure your Thanksgiving was extra special," Harper says in the video, which has a FanDuel logo superimposed over it. This was just one of many gifts Thompson said he received from Morgan, who communicated with him frequently via text message and shared details from her personal life. Morgan frequently provided Thompson with tickets to sporting events, including two Super Bowls.

PAU, France — Some people are natural performers. Torstein Træen is not, though his work on the bike might have been the last exciting general classification action before we get to Paris. As the 30-year-old Norwegian rider ascended the podium in Foix after Stage 4, to be wrapped in the yellow jersey, he grinned sheepishly and his Uno-X teammates gathered below to cheer him on. You wouldn't know he was bringing such a strange, interesting cycling career to an ecstatic new high. Træen looked shy, rocking back and forth like a character in an RPG loading screen and forgetting to take the ceremonial stuffed lion of victory until the podium attendant nudged him on the arm. At his official post-Tour press conference, at his other main interview, and at an interview after he crashed late in his first stage in the yellow jersey the next day (he's fine), the primary point Træen drove across was that he didn't really know what was going on. When a Japanese journalist looking for a very simple quote asked him about his extended family on the archipelago, Træen simply said, "I'm not really in contact with my Japanese family." Two days later, he was goofing around with the gendarmes and asking to hold one cop's gun. He is steady, laconic, the sort of rider I imagine Karl Ove Knausgaard would like (I emailed Knausgaard's representatives just in case). It didn't last, but it was beautiful.

I went to the Great American State Fair figuring it would make me feel lousy about my country. I don't remember being so right about anything.  I'd read all about how entertainers wouldn't take the stage, how states wouldn't staff the booths, and how nobody was showing up because the president had hijacked America's 250th birthday celebration and messed everything up. But with only a few days before this circus leaves town—the fair closes tomorrow—I wanted to see for myself if The Mess on the Mall could live down to its billing. And, sure, I wondered if Donald Trump's Stonehengian rendering of his proposed Arc de Failure looked as ridiculous in the flesh as online. (Yup and yup.) So I went. Turns out I was prepared for most of the awfulness. But not all the Jesus. So much Jesus. First, a summary of its pros and cons. 

There was always an irony to Happy's name. The elephant's misfortune stamped her a celebrity. In their home in the wild, female Asian elephants roam for hundreds of miles and form lifelong attachments to a group of around seven relatives. In her home in the Bronx Zoo, Happy lived alone in a small exhibit. She had been separated for decades from the zoo's other two Asian elephants, Maxine and Patty, for her own protection. So Happy became famous for her loneliness, deprived of companionship, of family, of physical touch. But Happy was smart, too. She stored treats in her ear. She was the first elephant to pass the mirror self-recognition test, proving her self-awareness when she saw her reflection and poked with her trunk at a white X painted on her forehead. In 2018, the Nonhuman Rights Project, an animal rights nonprofit, sued the Bronx Zoo to move Happy to a sanctuary, arguing that the elephant, in part because of her intelligence, should legally be considered a person. The suit was unsuccessful, and so Happy stayed put in her enclosure until her health deteriorated earlier this year. She was euthanized on May 26 at the age of 55. Patty, now the last elephant at the Bronx Zoo, lived much of her life in Happy's shadow. While clever Happy passed the mirror test, slow Patty did not. Patty has never been the subject of a lawsuit arguing for her personhood. Patty posed a different kind of problem for the zoo. In the summer of 2002, Patty and Maxine fatally attacked Happy's companion of 25 years, Grumpy, forcing the zoo to separate the elephants and making it harder for the public to root for Patty. When Happy died in May, the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, which runs the Bronx Zoo, issued a press release referring to her as "Happy, a Much-Loved Asian Elephant." On July 7, the WCS issued another press release about "Patty, an Asian Elephant." Patty, it seems, is not so loved. Now Patty, 57, has once again become a problem for the Bronx Zoo. Captive and wild elephants have been known to live into their 70s, and Patty has no known physical health issues. With Happy's death, Patty has become the loneliest elephant. As such, the WCS is evaluating what should happen to her next—if she will be sent to a sanctuary to join other elephants in a better simulacrum of wilderness, or if she will live out her years at the only home she has known for half a century, alone.