NowLoop

As a soccer fan, one of the best things you can do for your physical and mental well-being is to studiously avoid overreacting to results early in the season. Especially for the big teams, and especially especially coming off of a summer international tournament, the first few weeks of the league are essentially an extension of the preseason, and therefore should be considered little more than glorified training sessions aimed primarily at working players back into shape after their abbreviated, inebriated vacations. A Week 1 upset hardly condemns the loser to a season of disappointment, nor does it catapult the winner into the fight for the European places. That said, if any presumably good Premier League team could least afford to come stumbling out of the blocks, it's Manchester United, which opened its promise-laden new campaign with a humiliating loss to what is likely the worst team in the division. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR74IpnbJNk

San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York was arrested this weekend in Ohio, originally on the charge of engaging in prostitution, though a plea agreement amended it to misdemeanor charges. York, who is originally from Youngstown, Ohio, was arrested Sunday morning at the Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community in East Palestine, according to local news station WKBN. The arrest was reportedly conducted by the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force as well as East Palestine police. By Monday morning, York had pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools. According to Columbiana Court records, York was fined a total of $1,150 and sentenced to two days in Columbiana County Jail, concurrently, and received credit for one day already served. The 49ers owner had already filed a request to expunge the case from his record.

I can't help but empathize with the heirloom tomato this time of year. The first BLTs have been eaten; the novelty has worn off. Stacked on farmers' market tables like milk bottles in a carnival game, late-summer tomatoes start to look a little worse for wear. Like me, they are often etched with lines from spotty hydration. They're a little busted, a little bruised.  Also like me, they retain in their haggard hides a secret well of great beauty and value. If you find yourself with a surfeit of ugly heirloom tomatoes this summer, there is only one thing to do: Make tomato water.  Tomato water is the purest expression of a tomato—all heart, no husk. It is an excellent way to sneak umami, a word my editor told me I was only allowed to use once in this blog, into salad dressings and sauces and negronis. The water inside of a tomato is packed with glutamates, the savory compounds derived from having a thick ass. Those glutamates are the building blocks of MSG, which stands for Making Stuff Good. The magic trick of tomato water is that it allows you to make things more savory without necessarily making them salty. 

Some people are fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Philadelphia Eag—God, I’m exhausted just typing their name. Makes me wanna spit on a guy. https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/1963761757760930233

Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok." If, in the yearslong dark period when I had an agent but not yet a book deal, an editor had told me exactly what I needed to change about my project to get them to buy it, I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if what they wanted was a book I already had in the works—it just wasn't the one I wanted to publish first. This is what happened to Alexander Chee in the years after he graduated from his MFA. He had been working on two novel concepts, and editors vastly preferred one over the other. But he had a strong preference that one come first, his "shitty autobiographical novel" that would eventually become Edinburgh. The second novel, which would be The Queen of the Night, eventually did get published, but that was 15 years after Edinburgh.

Some of my favorite sports uniforms are red. This has always been true, and my choices of teams to support have only reinforced that. (A chicken-egg situation?) Other than the Miami Marlins (who did have the snazzy Sugar Kings red jerseys a few years back), the Miami Heat, the New England Patriots (god, I love those red throwbacks), Liverpool, Barcelona, and MY Florida Panthers all have red(-ish) uniforms. I therefore feel uniquely qualified to contribute a ranking of red jerseys across the major U.S. sports to our Reds Week mania. I scoured the major leagues for a hint of red, drew up a list, then rated each uniform 1-10. Within each block of the same rating, I ranked them based purely on my reaction to their shades of red and design work, and after spending more time on this than I'd planned to, I came up with a ranking of 35 red jerseys, from best to worst. This is subjective, of course, but also correct, objectively. My blog, my rules. I do feel the need to explain some choices, though, so here are a few notes before I begin: Initially, I included alternates for every sport, but that made the number balloon to almost 50. The NBA was the prime culprit here, as a lot of teams have red alternates or City Edition jerseys. So, I decided to just scrap alternates as a whole. The only exception is for Major League Baseball, because otherwise every away jersey is just gray. With that in mind, the leagues included below are MLB, NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL, NWSL, and MLS. Since this is mostly a vibes-based list, I made judgement calls on jerseys that are two colors. For example, Atlanta United's jersey felt red to me, while the New York Red Bulls black-and-red jersey was definitely more black than red, so it is not here. I also made a judgement call on maroon; while I have always thought of it more as purple than red, Billy raised a good point by saying that the jerseys' colors have names like "burgundy" and "bordeaux," which are types of red wine. Count 'em! Finally, this wasn't a rule, but more of an explanation: I tended to lean towards more classic-looking jerseys than modern monstrosities. This is personal taste, but it might help explain some placements on the list, including my number one.

Imagine you are a horny male redback spider. You might be a small guy—a fraction of her size—but unlike some, you don't have a complex about it. You're just happy to be there, "there" meaning the haphazard snarl of a web of a female redback spider. Only 20 percent of male redback spiders ever mate, so you're already feeling lucky. You know that the climax of your life has arrived, meaning your climax. You approach the spider and insert into her one of your two pedipalps, a pair of leg-like appendages that dangle by your mouth and hold your sperm. Then, as is custom, you initiate a parkour sequence. After doing a headstand, you flip yourself on your back, landing your body between the female's fangs. There, your palp still inside her, she begins to chew on you. If you survive this—which you often do thanks to your ability to squeeze your waist really small so her fangs can't immediately impale you—you two take a break. Then you're back in action, inserting your second palp in her and sliding cleanly into headstand number two, followed by that somersault, followed by more chewing. This time you let her finish you off, meaning eat you entirely. But you don't have a complex around this either. You have completed the work of your life, ensuring that the batches of eggs she will soon lay are all fathered by you, who, at this point, have departed this mortal coil, digested and excreted by your large and lovely mate. "This is the mating ritual of L. hasselti," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a PhD student at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote in an email. If this for some reason is hard to imagine, perhaps the following video will help.

Just shut up and solve our Monday crossword already. This week's puzzle was constructed by Owen Bergstein and Nick Dent, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Owen and Nick are longtime frenemies based in Boston. They met when Owen was a freshman in high school and Nick (aka "Mr. Dent") was a math teacher. Over the years, Nick served as the advisor for Owen's ever-growing Puzzle Club, one of the school's most popular clubs. By the time he graduated this May, Owen was spending all of his free time in Mr. Dent's room, annoying him with puns and music recommendations. Mr. Dent, in return, sends Owen gift links to Defector articles and fails to beat him at online Scrabble. This puzzle is the culmination of their four-year friendship/mentorship. This is Nick's first published crossword; for more by Owen, check out Dissonant Grids, the avant-garde crossword blog he ran for a year.  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."

I won't dispute that I once had red hair. Back in 2019, just for kicks, I went with a bright Hayley Williams–esque red that petered out for obvious reasons the following year. Then in 2025, with a 30th birthday and a big trip on the horizon, I decided to freshen up my look with a new color that my stylist tells me is as light as I can go without using bleach. For full transparency purposes, here is what it looks like the day after the salon. I thought of this hair as simply a lighter version of my natural brunette, specifically because it paled in comparison to the unmistakably fiery hair I'd sported several years ago. But I quickly realized that other people—especially those I was meeting for the first time—perceived me differently. One red-haired guy initially saw me as a ginger peer before teasing me about my roots. A new acquaintance referenced knowing "another Lauren with red hair." It came up consistently in catcalls and compliments, so, finally, I couldn't help but wonder: Is my hair red?

For as long as baseball’s All-Star Game has been played—almost every year since 1933, including twice a year from 1959 to 1962—it’s been the ultimate in wish fulfillment for fans. Want to see a team of future Hall of Famers playing together? It’s got that. Want to see your favorite local players honored on a national stage? It’s possible. Poignant curtain calls and unexpected comedy? You bet. But actual fan participation in selecting All-Star teams? That’s been a rockier road. In this generation, when baseball fans are inundated with emails and in-stadium announcements encouraging All-Star Game voting, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t always the case. But after the first game in 1933 featured fan voting, team selections were done briefly by player vote and then entirely by managers.