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It is the policy of Defector that co-owners who are on vacation should, when on vacation, try their best to be on vacation. There are complicating factors to this simple-sounding rule—it is both easy and tempting to pop into Slack during lulls or just out of habit, and that is only made more so by the years of damage or just slippage related to the idea of what are and aren't working hours—but it is a good policy. I say this as someone who wrote a decently long story for the site during my recently concluded vacation, although I can at least partially credit some untenably disgusting weather along with the aforementioned bad habits for that one. But some time away from work is an important and good thing no matter who you are, and I was glad to have it. Which is why I feel compelled to explain why I took a few moments out of my vacation last week to send Drew some questions about the San Diego Padres for him to ask Justin Halpern. Should I have done this? By the policy described above, absolutely not. But Justin Halpern appearances are very valuable to me, and if I was going to miss one, I wanted to make sure that my questions about his aesthetically unpleasant, objectively mediocre, completely baffling baseball team of choice made it into the episode. As it happened, Justin had to push his appearance back a week, which means I got to ask those questions myself. And if it was not my best work to spend my precious and limited time in Maine thinking about how best to ask what is wrong with Manny Machado, it was gratifying—after Drew told a story about recognized at the beach due to his distinctive noises, and Justin told a story about retiring Jose Canseco via groundout in a men's league game, to Ozzie Canseco's dismay—to get to hear Justin's answer.

The Milwaukee Bucks are going to have a hilarious roster next season. Tyler Herro! Myles Turner! Kevin Porter Jr.! Caris LeVert! Kyle fuckin' Kuzma! To assemble this Jaywalkers' Row of contributors, while also affording all of the non-corporeal essence of Damian Lillard that can be purchased with $22 million, takes some serious finagling. So much finagling, apparently, that it draws the concerned attention of the league's front office: According to a report from ESPN's Shams Charania, the Bucks are currently being investigated by the NBA for bizarre spending behavior. At issue is the deal made between the Bucks and free-agent guard Gary Trent Jr., who over the weekend agreed to a new four-year contract worth $64 million. Just in math terms, there is nothing extreme about the deal. The veteran minimum for a player who, like Trent, has played eight seasons in the NBA, is about $6.7 million. The maximum, for which Trent is not eligible, is more than $57 million. The non-taxpayer mid-level exception for the upcoming season—a carve-out for teams over the salary cap but under the luxury tax threshold, like the Bucks—is right about $16 million. Trent's new contract escalates season by season, and for the upcoming season will pay him a little over $14 million, per Spotrac. In NBA terms, a $16 million annual salary is not an eye-popping commitment. But in Gary Trent Jr. terms, a $16 million annual salary is, uhh, quite a lot. Meaning no more than the usual disrespect, Trent is just a guy, a streaky if hyper-willing shooter who does precisely nothing else of consequence on an NBA floor. He has played two seasons with the Bucks, and over that span was broadly awful. Last season he averaged 8.1 points per game, mostly as a reserve, and the Bucks were hopelessly overmatched during his minutes, worse by net rating by more than nine points per 100 possessions. The Bucks were hoping that Trent could keep them spaced and firing around Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Antetokounmpo's injuries plus the team's rapidly souring vibes ruined each of Milwaukee's last two campaigns, and now Giannis is in Miami and the team is a shambles.

Yes, posting a bunch of high-quality photos of fans taken right after their team lost a big game is a bit like shooting cod in a barrel, but I think you'll agree that there is something about crestfallen England fans that makes them particularly striking. I mean, just look at the before and after of the poor lad at the top of this post. Is that not the agony of being a sports fan, perfectly distilled into two images? This is what getting your soul snatched by Lionel Messi, after 30 minutes of cowardly defending, does to a country.

Baseball is a game of centimeters, and every carefully placed hair on a pitcher's head is the difference between a Cy Young season and an ERA higher than your jersey number. Take Toronto's Dylan Cease. At the All-Star Game, Cease explained that during spring training, he began turning his head toward third base mid-delivery in order to avoid rotating too quickly on his pitches. This is a small alteration, yet he has lowered his ERA to 2.56 from last year's 4.55. After hearing Cease describe the weight of his head (13 pounds), I realized that I had neglected so much of the minutiae that goes into a baseball player's success. Dedicating the better part of my next hour to meticulous research, I have developed a handful of seemingly minuscule yet ultimately revolutionary changes that baseball players can make to drastically improve their performance. Here are my suggestions: Fastball pitchers may find it helpful to shave their beards and keep their hair trimmed in order to prevent a deleterious drag on their four-seamer. The resulting velocities will turn every pitcher into a mini-Miz and leave batters cowering in fear at the plate.  For those pitchers trying to perfect their off-speed stuff, daily thumb-twiddling exercises can strengthen their grip on the ball, thus increasing both vertical and horizontal break. Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven swore by this technique, and very few know that his infamous habit of flipping off fans was not intended as a rude gesture, but was instead one of his regular finger-strengthening routines.  If you think the Soto Shuffle is a mere celebratory shimmy of the hips, you are sorely mistaken. The movement increases hip flexibility for a quicker and more powerful swing, and I theorize that this was a key contributor to Juan Soto's back-to-back Silver Slugger wins. If one were to expand the shuffle into a full-on samba, he would likely find a substantial increase in bat speed, exit velocity, and barrels. Studies indicate that catchers who tie their cleats with the "bunny ears" method rather than the standard one-loop method could dramatically improve their pop time. The bunny ears method increases toe flexibility and ankle strength, allowing for catchers to jump up from behind home with more acceleration and precise positioning for the throw to second. Sources say that JT Realmuto will throw his teammates' cleats out the window if he sees anyone on the Phillies tying them in a way that does not remind him of a rabbit. Batters who thank Jesus every time they touch a base are twice as likely to bat in a run on their next at-bat as those who only thank Jesus when crossing home. This reasoning is self-explanatory.  Pitchers and catchers would do well to kiss each other on the cheek after every mound visit. Such brotherly affection would promote communication and chemistry between players, and with runners on the corners, it's very important that lingering thoughts like "Does everyone secretly hate me?" and "I hope I didn't say something weird when we all huddled up" not creep into the head of an anxiety-prone reliever.  A belly-button piercing may very well be a better slump buster than Jason Giambi's gold thong. This season, a certain player went from having one of the worst batting averages in the league to enjoying a breakout series against a New York team during which he picked up 15 RBI. The only difference between the before and after was a brand new bejeweled piercing on his belly button. I will refer to this player as "Dansby S." in order to protect his anonymity. The most refined ballplayers understand the importance of scheduling a consultation with Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo, before a game. Such meetings are correlated with better plate discipline. A dream I had last week alerted me to the little-known fact that Ted Williams was a frequent visitor of Tiresias and attributed his high bases-on-balls-to-plate-appearance ratio to the mythical clairvoyant. Research indicates that batters who use Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" as a walk-up song are three times more likely to make it to first on a bunt than those who demonstrate a lack of musical taste at the plate. Further study is needed to know if the live version from the 1974 album Miles of Aisles is more effective than the original version from the 1969 album Clouds, or the 2000 re-recording with orchestral backing.

CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE, France — Roughly 15 minutes after driving past the start line, Harry Talbot decides it's time to pull over next to a field of droopy sunflowers. He scouted the route of Stage 11 of the Tour de France kilometer by kilometer earlier this year on Google Street View to identify potential spots where he and his fellow photographers could set up their shots, and we'd arrived at the first of the day. To my eye, the sunflower field is perfect. To Talbot, Zac Williams, and Max Fries, it is pretty clearly lacking. Talbot explains that he doesn't like the background of scrubby oaks on the far side of the field. "The sunflowers are nicely spaced, but the road isn't high enough to layer the shot," Williams observes. "It's not shit, but it's not a banger." They won't do. We drive on. I spent Stage 11 embedded with the trio of photographers. Williams and Talbot host the Race Chasers podcast together, and they're shooting for a handful of clients: some bike sponsors, some teams, some apparel brands. Fries works for Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe; while the other two photographers are targeting several dozen riders, he's only shooting eight. That's a limitation, rather than an advantage. "You only have eight possibilities," Fries said. "Yesterday on the climb, they were hidden in the group."

When Steve Yzerman took over as Red Wings general manager in 2019, the state of Michigan embraced him as the man who would return their hockey team to glory, or at least clean up the mess Ken Holland left behind. Some of that was nostalgia for the time he was the Wings' captain, helping them hoist three Stanley Cups. But it was based on something more tangible, too: Yzerman was coming from Tampa, and the Lightning's team-building in the 2010s was of the finest caliber. For his entire hockey career, Yzerman had been nothing but successful. Then he came back to Detroit. Wednesday's news that Yzerman is stepping down as GM was a huge surprise, if only for the timing. If a team wants to make a change, they almost always do so right after the season is over and, crucially, before the draft and free agency begin. Yzerman got deep into this offseason, which has not been a rosy one for the Wings, and now he's getting out. You can make some educated guesses at the reasons why, but they still aren't entirely clear. Any GM whose team holds the longest active playoff drought in the league, as the Red Wings do, has to be on the hot seat. This is especially true in Detroit, where fans got used to winning during a streak of 25 consecutive playoff appearances that started while Yzerman was a player and ended well into the salary-cap era. The last few years of that streak were just perfunctory cameos, and Detroit's reliance on old and expensive vets eventually bottomed them out. But the hope was that Yzerman could recharge the roster through a series of Tampa-esque drafts. That hasn't happened.

PEN America president Dinaw Mengestu resigned from his position this past Thursday after the troubled free-expression organization published a report reaffirming its opposition to cultural boycotts. The report, titled "A Silent Moratorium," recounts anecdotes from editors, agents, and writers who describe "rising isolation and exclusion" faced by Israeli and Jewish authors.  Mengestu saw the report as dangerously and falsely categorizing the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement—which seeks to impose financial and cultural costs on Israeli occupation and genocide—as discrimination. "What PEN America fails to understand is that a boycott is a form of dialogue," Mengestu wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on Monday. "A Silent Moratorium" took unusually long to produce because of the scrutiny PEN America knew it would face. The report relies heavily on secondhand anecdotes; of the handful of writers who speak directly about their own experiences, one is an English professor at an Israeli university who says his creative writing students are wondering, "What am I going to do with my manuscript?" Another is a creative writing PhD student at the same university, who hasn't submitted her finished novel to publishers because she's afraid it will be rejected. When it turns to data, "A Silent Moratorium" refers to 350 self-reports to a hotline for "anti­se­mit­ic lit­er­ary-relat­ed inci­dents." We are not given specifics about any of these incidents. One major piece of evidence in the report is the existence of a spreadsheet titled "Is your fav author a zionist???" that went viral on Twitter in May 2024 and targets writers of all races; the report tuts its tongue at chilling epithets in the spreadsheet like "also zionist lowkey."

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The rap song of the summer is undoubtedly Yung Miami's "Spend Dat." Produced by J. White Did It, the gloriously maximalist strip-club banger celebrates the joys of spending illegally acquired funds. It is a perfect summer rap record, and is also the perfect pop song for our moment of grift and speculative bubbles. We've all come to understand that the economy is an Oz with no wizard, a field as authentic as the people it has made insanely, criminally wealthy. There is functionally no difference between Elon Musk and your local wallet inspector from an economic standpoint, except for which one gets more attention from law enforcement. A song like "Spend Dat," which is like "We Are The Champions" for scammers, makes for a fitting theme song for the nation at large. https://youtu.be/74PnBM0g0CI?si=rjhqho5MTuycVHZf

Argentina is in the World Cup final for a second straight tournament. Somehow, some way, that is a true statement. After Cape Verde put the fear of god into the reigning champions, after Egypt had a 2-0 lead as late as the 79th minute, after Switzerland equalized and looked on the front foot in the quarterfinal, and after England scored first in Wednesday's semifinal, through it all, Argentina exhibited the kind of survival skills most often associated with crocodiles and Real Madrid in the Champions League. Many times throughout the knockout rounds, Argentina has looked as good as dead, staring face to face with the end of its hopes of becoming the first repeat champions in 64 years and the close of Lionel Messi's international career (I mean, I assume, but who knows with him; I've been wrong before). But as England found out on Wednesday, on death's door is where Argentina feels most alive. On the brink of elimination, Argentina has consistently conjured magic, and now, after a 2-1 victory that looked impossible until it became reality, Argentina is one match away from immortality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2og-PLyCUrs

The original version of this article was published in The Nation on July 13. When I first heard the 2026 World Cup was about to begin, I barely paid attention. This was partially because of the timing—most matches this year have aired late at night in Gaza because of the time difference with the United States—but mostly because I couldn't imagine how anyone here would watch the games.