NowLoop

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking AI, Heather Cox Richardson, knives, and more. Your letters: Bryan:

When I survey energy markets—that is, when I gaze through binoculars at the gas station sign I can read from my home as long as there isn’t a big truck in the intersection—I see the disruptive effects of supply shocks. Pain at the pump follows from mismanaged supply chain risk. A parallel trend exists in…

With just under two months until the start of the 2026 World Cup, it seems that FIFA executives have finally looked up at the horizon, seen the looming shitstorm, and are now scrambling to head it off. The Athletic reported on Tuesday that top FIFA heads have sought to convince Gianni Infantino to make a "president-to-president" appeal to Donald Trump and ask if he can find it in his heart of hearts to give his ICE jackboots a summer vacation. Specifically, the idea FIFA wants Infantino to run by Trump is that there be a full moratorium on ICE activities in the United States for the 39-day duration of the World Cup. From The Athletic's report: "The Athletic has been told Infantino informed senior FIFA management he was receptive to this idea and he would seek to make a president-to-president ask of Trump to reduce ICE’s role during the tournament. [...] It is not known at this stage whether Infantino has yet made the request, or if he will follow through on it, or indeed whether the White House would be prepared to countenance such a request regarding domestic policy in the United States from FIFA."

With the eighth pick of the WNBA Draft on Monday, the Golden State Valkyries took a big, fun swing by selecting LSU guard Flau'jae Johnson. Though she was inconsistent in her senior campaign at LSU, Johnson preceded that with three standout seasons for the Tigers, and she has the sort of game-breaking athleticism that could comfortably translate to the physical demands of the bigger, faster W. Preliminary reaction among Valkyries fans was enthusiastic though short-lived, because the team traded her to the Seattle Storm within an hour of making the pick. The deal made by Valkyries general manager Ohemaa Nyanin is difficult to rationally explain. In exchange for Johnson, Golden State received the first pick of the 2026 second round, which they used on TCU's Marta Suarez, and the Storm's 2028 second-rounder. Whatever you think of Johnson and Suarez as prospects, the eighth pick is worth more than two second-rounders. Usually when teams make trades like this on draft night, it's the team moving up that overspends for the right to take a player it's fixated on, not the team moving down. This is also out of character for Nyanin, who impressed in her first season by building an expansion roster that made it to the playoffs. It would've been great to hear her explain the trade, but she declined to do so after the draft. The first question of the presser was obviously about the trade, and this was Nyanin's answer in full:

Time began tormenting me in March of last year. I had been traveling for weeks to promote my book about gossip, a kind of capstone to the fastest-paced era of my life. All of it—the podcast we made, the fervent response it received, the life of deadlines, and the pressure and joy it created—flew by. I felt as if I had not really sat down or slept or relaxed in four years. Then suddenly, by my own choosing, it was over. For the first time since 2021, I did not know what the next six months held for me. My weeks were not scheduled down to the minute. The urgency of responsibility and expectations left me, and time stretched out before me like a wide, open plain: infinite and terrifying.  During these weeks of travel, I carried around On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle in my bag, with the hope that I might choose to open it and read instead of responding to emails or looking at my phone. The Danish novel—the first of seven in a series, four of which have now been translated into English—follows Tara Stelter, an antiquarian bookseller, who is trapped inside a time loop. Every night, she goes to bed on November 18th, and every morning, she wakes up and it is November 18th again. There is no big bang, no huge mistake, no life-altering decision in Tara’s life. One night, she has dinner with some friends in Paris on a work trip. The only really remarkable thing about the day was that she touched a hot lamp and got a mild burn, but the burn isn’t even really that bad, and Tara feels certain that it will heal fine. The next morning, she goes to eat breakfast at the hotel, and as she watches the same piece of bread float to the ground, just like it did the day before, she knows in her gut that this is more than deja vu. “The moment I saw this hesitant action I knew that I was witnessing a repetition,” she writes. “I knew that something was wrong.”  One of the first things Tara learns about her new life is that not everything can or will enter the time loop in which she exists. Though her bank account automatically resets every day, so she has plenty of money, the things she buys do not necessarily remain. Some evaporate into the loop without warning. Some, like an antique coin she bought for her husband, disappear and then reappear again. The only way to try and keep an object in the loop is to keep it with her: to carry it about on her day, sleep with it in her bed and worry over it. In this way, my relationship with the first volume of Balle’s series followed the rules of Tara’s world. I carried the book around with me, accidentally slept with it in my bed, until it stuck, and one day it could no longer leave me. I opened the first volume on a cold March night in Chicago, and I began my own journey into the 18th of November just as Tara did: waking up in a hotel room in a city that is not my own, and knowing that my future would be different. 

"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," said no blogger ever. But we're not made entirely out of mud and coal. With the 16 NHL playoff teams officially set, if not yet the exact matchups, I'd like to offer in the meantime a kind of anti–playoff preview, where we cover every team whose season is over. I'll say one nice thing and one mean thing about each. We'll start at the middle of the standings and descend from there. Washington Capitals A Nice Thing: In what might be his final NHL season, 40-year-old Alex Ovechkin leads the team yet again with 32 goals. Even if he's just running up the score on Gretzky now, everyone who saw Ovi notch 900 and beyond in person this year is thankful for the memory.

Everyone gather 'round for a beef update. The beef update is this: Chappell Roan and Jorginho are no longer having one. According to Jorginho, that is. The Flamengo midfielder, who started this whole beef cycle several weeks ago with an Instagram post, has now declared it finished with yet another Instagram post. After accusing one of Roan's security guards of being rude and mean to his 11-year-old daughter at a hotel in São Paulo, the soccer star is now ready to chalk the whole thing up as a misunderstanding. "I made my initial statement in the heat of the moment, after hearing that my child and wife had been approached by an adult male security guard in an intimidating way," said Jorginho in his statement. "Since then, I have become aware of new information that has changed my understanding of parts of what happened."

Basketball has been a key part of my life since I was a little kid, both as entertainment and, very briefly, a possible career. I played school and club ball and participated in numerous expensive training camps knowing that my parents, both of whom played in high school, felt strongly that the world of professional sports might be a viable means of making a living. I never connected with that dream and ditched basketball the second I had the option.  It wasn’t until I started attending Aces games here in Las Vegas that I began to fully appreciate the possibilities of the sport, as a game of finesse and skill and a stage for organized labor. Nascent but scrappy, the Aces were an expansion team created in a city that lacked a cohesive sports identity. The Aces have become a dynastic power in the WNBA, winning three of the last four titles, and their rise has come at a time attention and scrutiny on the league has dramatically increased. My family got a more intimate glimpse of these developments when we became friends with veteran journeyman Carolyn Swords, who played for the Seattle Storm, the New York Liberty, the Chicago Sky, and overseas teams during her career before dedicating her last years to the Aces.  I reached out to Carolyn while the new WNBA collective bargaining agreement was still being litigated to chat about her playing years, her time on the executive committee of the 2020 CBA, and what the future of the league holds when athletes continue to advocate for each other. Our conversation has been edited for clarity. 

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how Pope Leo XIV, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is "too liberal" and "weak on crime"—for God's sake, there's graffiti all over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!—apparently in tantrum response to Leo XIV having criticized both Trump's war of aggression on Iran and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's framing of that war as having been ordained by God. A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder. What else. Oh right. Also, toward the end of last week, Trump announced that the United States would begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz, which the nation of Iran has been blockading ever since the U.S. attacked that country illegally and without provocation at the end of February. For those catching up, Trump has spent the past several weeks desperately attempting to browbeat the rest of the world into opening the strait by force on his behalf, while also continually insisting on his social-media website that the strait is of no consequence and also that the U.S. military could open it at any time. Keen students of history may recall way back in double-aught-one week ago, when Trump threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Iran if it did not open the strait within a few hours. A lesser tactician might observe that responding to a blockade of the strait by blockading the strait is the equivalent of punishing a guy for punching you in the face by also punching yourself in the face. What this analysis fails to apprehend is that in war, you cannot be defeated if, whenever anything happens in the war, you say that it was no big deal and also everybody else's fault and also good actually and due to your genius. OK, back to the AI image of Trump as Jesus Christ. As one might imagine, Trump's choice to propagate this image has not gone down super well with whole huge swaths of the populace, including many of the types of people who, while politically conservative and otherwise sympathetic to many of Trump's hatreds and resentments and perhaps before now proud to have voted for him, are sensitive to what my colleague David Roth called "red-letter Antichrist Shit," and so get a little itchy when an elected world leader A) starts an elective war in the Middle East, and B) portrays himself as the Messiah. In fact, many of those people spent much of the past 36 hours calling him the Antichrist, right there on his own website. Trump deleted the image at some point around midday on Monday.

Sea, trees, and hills make Monte Carlo the prettiest stop on the tennis tour, but for Sunday's championship, it did its best to dull itself. The singles final featured gray sky, chilly air, and gusts tossing the ball around unpredictably. It was sure to be a rough outing at the Monte-Carlo Country Club, no matter the faces on court or the stakes of the match. The two era-defining players in men's tennis, scrapping for the world's top ranking, could not overcome the weather and redeem the day. Even with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner out there—or precisely because each was playing against the other—there were wild wind-borne errors and moments of uncharacteristic anti-clutch. Not every installment in a classic rivalry is itself a classic, but Sinner's 7-6(5), 6-3 victory, which snagged his first big clay-court title and let him regain the No. 1 ranking, still left me with plenty to chew on. One of the most surprising aspects of this matchup is that it took until April 12 for it to happen. Throughout 2025, Sinner and Alcaraz effectively had a standing date in the final of every big event. Because no other player seemed good enough yet to interfere, this pattern was expected to continue in 2026. At the start of this season, they narrowly missed one another in the Australian Open final, thanks to a blazing performance from late-stage Novak Djokovic. Then came another miss in the Indian Wells final, as occasional interloper Daniil Medvedev got out of his funk to beat Alcaraz. (Firmly back in his funk, Medvedev lost his first match in Monte Carlo 6-0, 6-0, and smashed his racket seven times.) Upsets for Sinner in Doha and Alcaraz in Miami prevented a clash between the top two seeds in those locales, too. All told, it had been about four months since they last met in the championship match of the ATP Finals. After such a lengthy tolerance break, I expected to have my mind lit up by an encounter on clay, the surface that most emphasizes their physicality and point construction, best seen in their generational duel at the French Open last year. That was not the match we got at Monte Carlo. The conditions were just too disruptive, and the players could never settle into enough of rhythm, instead providing a twitchy battle that still had plenty of tension to it, if not rallies constructed like epic poems.