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This past weekend, Ed Sheeran performed his first concert since decrepit Patriots owner Robert Kraft stuck his hand up the singer's ass and made him respect Israel. The culturally Irish but politically English musician played with no openers and a new backing band Saturday night in Philadelphia, because all his previous supporting acts abandoned him after his craven decision to drop pro-Palestine rapper Macklemore from his U.S. tour, at the behest of Kraft and other NFL stadium owners. During Saturday's show, Sheeran read a prepared statement presented as an apology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInyzsqLvKg Sheeran delivered everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating, meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else. A partial transcript:

Gable Steveson, the hottest UFC prospect in years, who arrived at the promotion with a past marked by a sexual assault allegation, got knocked out by a nobody in 12 seconds on Saturday in Los Angeles. Dana White sure knows how to pick ‘em. Steveson, an NCAA legend and Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, was given a slot on the main card in just his second UFC fight. That fast-tracking now looks absolutely foolish. Mere moments into the fight, Steveson walked into a straight right hand to the chin from Sean Sharaf, previously winless as a UFC heavyweight, which was followed instantly by a nuclear left hook to the jaw. The precise and savage 1-2 left Steveson unconscious before he hit the mat. Steveson seemed on the verge of adopting the fencing response on the canvas before referee Frank Trigg jumped in to protect him. Steveson’s night, and his status as White's chosen one, were done.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4heWhQrQb4Y

On July 13, California state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that he would lead a 12-state coalition in mounting a supposedly bold legal challenge to the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery mega-merger. The deal had cleared every previous legal hurdle, but the states had to try and stop the Ellison family from gaining control over the plurality of American media production because, in Bonta's words, that consolidation would represent a "death knell for the film and TV industry—and for our democracy." Two months later, the parties have settled the suit, with the states meekly submitting and getting nothing serious to show for it. What a waste of time. After a nine-month campaign, the Ellisons have won the right to dictate the future of American entertainment and media. It all began in December 2025, when Netflix agreed to pay WBD $72 billion in cash and stock for the latter's streaming and film-studio businesses. When WBD rejected Paramount's competing all-cash offer for everything it had, adding the TV arm to the assets in the Netflix deal, Paramount mounted a hostile takeover bid. The Ellisons' ominous pitch to WBD shareholders was: You better take our deal or our friend the President will reject your merger. It worked. When the WBD board offered Netflix a chance to match Paramount's offer, the streaming giant instantly said no, and David Ellison had his prize. All he needed to do was jump over a few regulatory hurdles, most of which have been lowered or removed for people like him under the second Trump Administration. The Department of Justice approved the deal in June.

Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veterans, including Díaz and the dreaded C.B. Bucknor, raised their hands. Bucknor is already missing from the sport, having absorbed a deflected Jacob Misiorowski heater with his face mask back in May, and has not returned since. Díaz, meanwhile, has had the summer to make a farewell tour and reflect on his time in the game. His conclusion, per an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today: Baseball stinks now. Díaz will not miss it. "There’s just so much scrutiny and negative stuff now," Díaz said. "There are a lot of people I’m going to miss, and I made a lot of friends, but what I won’t miss is the game. Not one bit. It’s just changed so much. There’s so much more technical stuff. It’s kind of restricted us. I mean, everything is black and white now. You can’t manage the game." The not-fond farewell will largely be mutual, at least among the baseball-watching public. In any given era, casual fans might know the names and faces of just a handful of umpires, and never for any happy reason. Díaz is a known guy, and not only because he was the subject of the most theatrical of Aaron Boone's many, many meltdowns. He is not especially pugnacious or hot-headed, but his strike zone is subject to mood and influence. The adoption, in television broadcasts, of K-Zone technology has allowed the tracking and posting of umpire performance for decades now. Whether those efforts are reliable, they are influential, and for years they have said that Díaz has his own interpretive strike zone, which tends to be elastic and pitcher-friendly. The website Ump Scorecards says that Díaz is maybe not a Bucknor-level disaster back there, but that he tends to miss a lot: This season, for instance, Ump Scorecards says Díaz is worst in baseball in the cumulative Correct Calls Above Exp., which they describe as the difference "between actual correct calls and expected correct calls."

Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor handiwork. But other times, if you're both stubborn and resourceful enough, you can get yourself out of whatever jam a shit recipe has put you in. I have one such story for you. The recipe in question was for a chocolate cream pie, which I will not link to here because it's a failed recipe. We were having my wife's parents over for dinner last night to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday. The plan was to make a key lime pie for dessert, which would be no trouble at all. I use a recipe for key lime that I found online that never fails. Plus, we already had a ready-made graham cracker pie crust on hand for it. Bingo bango, one pie down. But my wife had also grabbed a ready-made chocolate pie crust at the store, and I had no go-to recipe to use with that one. So I did a lazy search and found a chocolate cream pie recipe that looked simple enough. All I had to do was beat a few ingredients together over a stovetop, pour it into the shell, stick it in the fridge, and that was it.

For all of his flaws as a manager, and there are plenty, José Mourinho always provides clubs the full José Mourinho Experience. The Special One instantly becomes the center of attention wherever he goes, no matter the circumstances, and while that might overshadow his players, it also puts all of the spotlight and the pressure on the manager. In the past, this has been an issue as Mourinho gets carried away with playing up the gimmick, but for a club like 2026–27 Real Madrid, coming off of a season in which two of its players fought and one of them was FORGETTING THINGS, perhaps Mourinho's gravitational pull is exactly what it needed. Take, for example, Sunday's derby between Madrids Real and Atlético, a 2-1 win for the latter at the Metropolitano over the 10-man visitors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLzrK9H8XLc

It is generally agreed that the Miami Dolphins are the worst team in professional football not named the Ottawa Redblacks. In fairness, the Dolphins could go 0-13 in the NFL, just like the Redblacks have in Canada, based on all the things they have not done, are not doing, and will not do between now and Thanksgiving. Everyone agreed when the season began that the Dolphins were going to stink to high heaven, so we can move off them. Indeed, losing in Week 1 to the Raiders did not elevate Las Vegas in the football speaking world because the same logic was applied to the Dolphins that is typically applied to teams beating the Raiders: Well, it's the Raiders. What else would you expect? Well, now we're stuck with wondering if the Raiders are actually cured of their Raiderhood because after whomping the miserable Dolphins, they whomped the Los Angeles Chargers Sunday by nearly the same score, and we are confronted by one of two choices—we are finally wrong about the Raiders for the first time since Jon Gruden was fired, which we refuse to accept, or the Chargers are as god-awful as the Dolphins are and as such could be as bad as the Redblacks, too. And the jury is feverishly deliberating that even as we speak.

Have a seat and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids. 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."

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people shared on Twitter and in this announcement blog. What I do know from experience is that none of this would have been possible without Jasper Wang. Readers will know him from his annual financial report blogs, but it cannot be overstated how much this company owes to his steady hand, his pragmatism, and his extremely smart brain. I knew that Jasper had a successful career in corporate consulting, and that when Deadspin imploded, he reached out to a few newly unemployed writers to buy them a beer and see if there was anything he could do to help. I knew that awkward first date led to more conversations and, a year later, the launch of this experiment that somehow has continued to exist for six years. Despite having worked with Jasper for five years, I had never talked to him about how he made the decision to walk away from a high-paying salary and take the risk of a new business with a bunch of bloggers. Once I decided that this season's theme would be focusing on can't-turn-back moments, I knew Jasper had to be a guest.

It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miéville’s writing incorporates all manner of historical and linguistic snags, at once erudite and irreverent, challenging but inviting. A Miéville novel or story collection is like a rabbit hole, prompting the reader down stray paths of unexpected inquiry and discovery. It’s never a bad idea to read one of his novels with a dictionary nearby, not because his work is abstruse or opaque, but because, in order to fully step into the worlds Miéville creates, one has to learn a slightly new language. This is, in fact, a microcosm of the premise of his 2011 alien novel Embassytown. Many readers are happy to put in the work. He has won the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards and reached the New York Times bestseller list, most recently with the excellent novel The Book of Elsewhere, co-written with Keanu Reeves. Scan through the timeline of his career and one will find all manner of surprises, from a children’s book to a contribution to the Pathfinder RPG to non-fiction, with a book of Marxist theory, a history of the Russian Revolution, a book about the Communist Manifesto, as well as Salvage, a bi-annual literary political journal co-founded by Miéville alongside other leftist writers like editor Rosie Warren and Richard Seymour.  Miéville’s political and historical forays, alongside his talents as a master of the strange and inexplicable, inform his new novel The Rouse, a 1200-page epic that incorporates every rabbit hole he’s ever traveled down and then some. The Rouse follows a British woman named Maur from the 1970s into the present day. Maur is many things: a mother, an artist, an activist, a haunted fighter. After her only son’s inexplicable death while serving in the British army, Maur unwittingly stumbles down a dark, ancient path in order to find answers. Who was her son? What was he involved in? Why are there so many other parents of deceased soldiers in the exact same predicament as her? The Rouse untangles multiple narrative and historical strands, traveling from the early 20th century through the Cold War into the GWOT and finally present day. Shadowy government forces utilize covert, even supernatural tactics to fight anti-imperialist splinter cells. This is a world of black ops and shamans, where the revolutionary legacy of Patrice Lumumba intertwines with unfathomable eldritch horrors.