NowLoop

In some ways, the omnipresence of mystery in everyday life can be comforting. Why is it always cold at the end of the hallway? How did my cat make that noise at 2 in the morning? Why does my car’s brake light keep going out on the driver’s side? Sure, there may be explanations, but I’m not going to be the one to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t grow up watching Ghostbusters aspirationally.  Today’s gossip raises the age-old question: Who you gonna call? If your house might actually be haunted and your kids are freaking out, you’d better come up with an answer. https://youtu.be/tVM4RvqxBak

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, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life.

VOIRON, France — Last week, my colleague Jonny Long from Escape Collective (EC) remarked that he speaks to more old people at the Tour de France than he does the whole rest of the year. It's true, and not altogether surprising: France has an aging population, so they have old guys, and cycling's culture is one of reverence for the legends of yore, so the old guys are here. Tour crowds aren't monolithic—I find myself pantomiming French toward all manner of locals and tourists alike—yet they skew white, Western European, and older. But really, "old guys" is too narrow a descriptor. What defines the crowds here at the Tour is more the omnipresence and internal diversity of the uncs on display. We got uncs watching the race from the roadside, uncs strolling around with VIP passes, uncs gathering at the start to stare at the bikes, open-mouthed, with hands clasped behind their back like umarells. The press corps is largely composed of unc-type individuals. As I write this from the press room near the finish of Stage 17, I see the strange German reporter who exclusively asks terrible questions and exclusively wears capris and rhinestone-bedazzled shirts; the evil Italian TV guy who does Julius Randle moves while trying to box people out of press scrums; and the two Spanish reporters who keep falling asleep, to the delight of the rest of the Spanish press corps. If you want to know what sorts of people flock to the Tour de France, know the uncs. I am now going tell you about some of my favorites, in the order I encountered them. For organizational purposes, I find it useful to judge our subjects on four axes: the Sunburn Index, Severity of Frenchness, the Indifference Quotient, and Poison Binary. All scores are out of seven, and are self-explanatory, except maybe the last one though it's a binary so you can probably figure it out. Allez.

ESPN staff was hit by another round of layoffs this week, which in some sense barely registers as news given that the network is stuck in a constant state of downsizing. This round of cuts was notable, however, due to some of the recognizable names who were let go: Karl Ravech, David Lloyd, Stephania Bell, Cam Newton, Ryan Clark, and Tom Pelissero were among the cuts. Whether you wish to cheer or jeer any particular departure, there's no denying the significance of ESPN cutting loose someone like Ravech, who has been with the network since 1993 and became synonymous with its baseball coverage. Lloyd started with ESPN in 1997 and has become one of the more familiar faces on SportsCenter; Bell pioneered fantasy-focused injury analysis and turned that into a gig that lasted nearly 20 years; Pelissero is an NFL insider who is just as plugged in as Ian Rapoport and Adam Schefter. These are people sports fans have real relationships with. It is also impossible not to think about these layoffs in the context of some other recent news about ESPN. In June, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported that the network was in the midst of negotiating a new contract for host Pat McAfee, which would pay him more than $60 million per year. Even McAfee himself wasn't immune to making this connection, and attempted to defend his worth during Tuesday's episode of his daily television show:

There's not a lot of NBA news happening right now, so we must welcome any sort of chaos we can find, even of the accidental kind. On Tuesday night, the excruciating wait for LeBron James to make up his damn mind about where he is going to play next season wore down the faculties of at least one social media employee, as the Miami Heat accidentally published an unlisted video on its YouTube channel, which signaled LeBron's introductory press conference for the team he won his first (and second) title with will happen on July 27. https://twitter.com/WadexFlash/status/2079742594586952066

"The city was question and answer in one," Colson Whitehead writes early on in Cool Machine, the final novel of his Harlem Trilogy. "Cause and effect and everything else, too." You can forgive the lifelong New Yorker for being a little romantic about his hometown, which is both the setting and central metaphor across the tales of Harlem furniture salesman-cum-not-so-reluctant-crook Ray Carney, whose misadventures come to a conclusion with Machine. Carney's capers, inspired by heist movies, are presented as discrete novellas, with each book—Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto are the first two—consisting of three parts. Collectively, they span both a whole array of thieving and schemes as well as nearly three decades of New York history.  These vivid, pulpy, compulsively readable novels allow the two-time Pulitzer winner to have a lot of fun, while providing readers with an informed perspective on the city through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, plus a healthy dose of structural critique (New York, of course, is built on thievery and deception just like most places). It goes down easy thanks to Whitehead's superlative ability to weave deep research with rich narrative: Carney, his partner Pepper, and all their other motley associates are so vibrant and winning that it's easy to understand why the author wanted to stick with them through three books. For those who only know Whitehead through The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys—gutting, inventive, and understandably acclaimed works on slavery and juvenile incarceration, respectively—a juicy genre series might seem out of character. But he's reiterated over and over that horror and other genre fiction is his comfort zone; readers familiar with his other work know Whitehead is a remarkable humorist. If I may here plug John Henry Days, which a quarter-century later stands as a remarkably prescient media satire among many other things, right down to the indictment of "content" ... Whitehead, for the uninitiated, got his start at the Village Voice. He's even on Bluesky, reposting memes in keeping with his persona as your friendly, self-deprecating Gen X literary genius next door. Cool Machine is a portrait of his New York, spotlighting the downtown arts and music scenes of the ’80s through the bewildered, middle-aged eyes of Carney and Pepper (for comedic effect, of course). 

The San Francisco Giants are a rotten, poisoned, blighted organization. I offer to the jury, by way of evidence, the following exhibit: Monday evening, a representative of the Giants saw a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about fans who still feel hurt and angry over the mess the organization made of its annual Pride Night celebration, and the front office's tepid, quarter-hearted, wildly inadequate response to public outcry. That team representative then logged onto social media so that they could blame the continuing controversy on online discourse and clickbait reporting. That representative, hilariously, was the team's chaplain, a man named Christian Huang. The story Huang was commenting on was published Monday, and it begins with an anecdote about a longtime Giants fan who attended the home game on June 12, had a great time, and then learned after the fact about the Giants pitchers who'd made a spectacle of themselves by scrawling Bible passages onto their Pride Night hats in an act of protest. The fan, who identifies as queer, was hurt by what they described as players on the team using their uniform and platform as an opportunity to "tell me you hate me." The fan has joined up with others to express this hurt, by writing to the team and also by participating in protest actions. What Huang took away from this story is not that the Giants biffed Pride Night, that the organization is due for some soul-searching, that its response to the hurt feelings of its fans has been inadequate and embarrassing, and that there is an opportunity to get this right by having someone from the team make a public effort at taking the matter seriously. Huang's big takeaway is, in fact, that Pride Night was a rousing success, and that media shit-stirring is the only reason that people are now worked up about it. In comments made under the Chronicle's Instagram post, Huang is just innocently recapping their reporting, as if to provide a helpful TL;DR for busy readers. "To recap, Sarah was not upset until the media's firestorm caused her to be upset," he wrote in a comment. Down the thread, in response to pushback from a member of the distressingly small minority of commenters who did not just dump out rank bigotry, Huang continued: "Sarah was not upset until she went online. The experience was great until then. I'm only recapping the Instagram caption."

PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Shohei Ohtani play in person. But where was the phantastic two-way player, six-time all-star, and four-time MVP? Certainly not in the City of Brotherly Love. Whatever phacsimile was at the plate went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and an intentional walk. In other words, the most Ohtani did in that game was have a reputation for being a threat. Yes, I know players have bad games. But I’ve seen enough to understand that Shohei Ohtani is nothing compared to baseball’s real two-way player, Trea Turner, who was such an important force for both teams that he was responsible for almost half the runs scored in the Phillies' 10-7 win. When Turner played short, ostensibly trying to help the Phillies prevent runs, everything hit his way turned to butter. Only one of his mishaps was ruled an error—a dropped ground ball from Mookie Betts in the top of the first which allowed the Dodgers to load the bases—but his defense assisted Los Angeles in several different ways. In the fourth inning, Turner misplayed a grounder from Alex Call to produce a single instead of a third out. In the sixth, he bobbled Andy Pages’s ground ball when he could have ended the inning with a simple throw to first, allowing Teoscar Hernandez to score. In the ninth, he misplayed Tommy Edman’s line drive up the middle to allow another runner on base and advance Pages. But also, because Turner is such a great two-way player, he hit two home runs and a double, bringing in a total of phive runs for the Phillies. His dual loyalty was so confusing that those in the ballpark couldn’t decide how to feel about him. When Turner stepped up to bat, they booed, then cheered, then decided simply to make ambiguous noise.

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 about food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the football field, and more. Before I get started, you guys might know that I moonlight as a weekly columnist over at SFGate. I joke that I work for the only two decent news sites left in America, because it's kinda true. But SFGate, like virtually every other media company dependent on ad revenue, got hammered when Google turned its search product into an AI mill. To help counter the losses, my overlords at the gate rolled out a subscription app for the site last week. Like Defector, it’s a cheap date, it has a clean, ad-free interface, and it protects the company newsroom from being decimated by outside forces. So if you can spare five bucks a month, please consider giving it a whirl. Now, your letters:

A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to the news archive: all the articles on the website, still online for the moment.  A scrap of an explanation rested on the second page of an FAQ, stating that the website "evolved into a dedicated scores, and tournament information destination. For the full Tennis Channel experience—analysis, and original programming—visit tennischannel.com or the Tennis Channel app." (Tennis Channel owns tennis.com.)  Tennis was the standard-bearing publication about the game for decades. Pete Bodo, among the longest-tenured and most influential tennis writers alive, spent 50 years of his career there. Bodo wrote magazine profiles at the beginning of his career, getting to know the players and delivering accurate, poignant portraits of them to the public. His 1994 tennis tome The Courts of Babylon is studded with raw, startling anecdotes about players, like Ilie Nastase charging his German opponent in the locker room after a match at the 1976 U.S. Open with a cry of "Fuck you, Hitler!" By the time the site folded, Bodo had shifted to part-time, but continued to write columns and features for tennis.com right up until the end of the website.