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Some things are just timeless. Gossip, for instance, has likely been around as long as humans have been able to communicate with one another, and then share someone else’s business. Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old ice man? Probably a gossiper and definitely a messy guy. Something else just as timeless? Pranks! Normal Gossip is back for its 10th season! Who could have guessed that so many friends had silly, outrageous and harrowing stories they wanted to share with the world. We’re grateful to every listener and everyone who keeps sending us their gossip. To celebrate season 10 we’re bringing back some of your favorite guests and sharing some of the most chaotic gossip ever to grace our inbox! And as you may have heard, Defector is swiveling to video! (We will not use the word “pivot” here.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nwoXWiaSz0

The crud-ass New York Mets were able to manage a series split on the road against division-leading Atlanta during the long weekend, overcoming severe bullpen issues for 10-9 and 7-6 victories on Sunday and Monday. But before any fan could even begin to think about letting their guard down or their hopes up, New York returned home to kick off a series with the Royals and deliver another entry in this year's contest for "Most Frustrating Loss." Again, the Mets offense did their part, but Kansas City beat the brakes off some minor-league relievers to win the game 16-12. The Royals play 500 miles from the nearest Defector blogger, and they don't possess the largest payroll in baseball, so we haven't given them a fraction of the attention we've devoted to the Mets. But they've sucked just as bad, albeit in a less spectacularly disappointing way. They spotted the Mets a 9-4 lead through four innings; Carson Benge opened the scoring on a three-run, three-error slapstick display that, defensively, is basically what you do when you want your 6-year-old nephew to feel like he hit a home run. https://youtu.be/XtdNefccOKU?si=1EF7_VoBGGvDyEJm&t=40

Heading into this year's Wimbledon, neither Coco Gauff nor Naomi Osaka had made a deep run at the tournament, despite winning a total of six Slams elsewhere. Gauff had peaked at the fourth round, and Osaka at the third round, three times apiece for both players. An observer trying to make sense of this history could argue that their styles of play weren't flattered by the demands of grass-court tennis. Osaka's power game relies on rhythm, which she gets from the ball's consistent and reliable bounces off a hard court; Gauff's raw foot speed and rally tolerance aren't great competitive advantages on a surface where it's so slippery and difficult to defend. They weren't alone in their struggles. For the majority of pro tennis players on both tours, grass appears to be a surface they learn to tolerate rather than one to relish, despite Wimbledon being the most prestigious tournament in the sport. Grass gets a short stint on the calendar, typically just one or two tournaments for most players, and it demands a bit of adaptation. The dominant mode of tennis these players have learned and played all their lives—high-topspin baselining, enabled by polyester strings, fast swings, and explosive lateral movement—are not as viable when the ball's bounces are so low and unpredictable. We should celebrate the vanishingly small number of true grass-court specialists out there, those who lean into the surface's eccentricities and are indeed empowered by them. For example, take the slice-master Tatjana Maria on the women's side, whose big results on grass—the 2022 Wimbledon semifinals, a Queen's Club title in 2025—stand stark against her journeywoman career. On the men's side this year, there was Shintaro Mochizuki, a net-rushing demon who ran from qualifiers all the way to a fourth-round loss to Jannik Sinner, unable to hit any given ball all that hard but able to place every single one on a designated blade of grass. That's real tennis, and these are real ballers. In an ideal world, grass season would be dominated by players with great hands and that numinous quality called "court sense," which might be a mix of ball control, anticipation, and pattern recognition. I would accept any amount of tinkering with the parameters of the sport—string bans, ball quality, court speed—to make this style of play viable again. This phase of the tennis season would be a delight.

SAINT-GAUDENS, France — On Monday morning, the Tour de France's media-wranglers sent us all a text announcing something genuinely shocking for such a French organization: They had banned smoking. The ASO said nobody could smoke in the TV areas "in order to combat fire risks," as that day's racing finished 60 kilometers west of the Trévillach wildfire, which has forced over 12,000 people to evacuate their homes. That day, the race entered France to 44 kilometers of quiet roads after organizers and local politicians told fans to stay away. The next day was the hottest day of racing in the recorded history of the Tour. The smoking ban may have been primarily about avoiding the queasy optics of a ponytailed TV rigman ripping a cigarette on a day with restricted access, though it's a decent metaphor for the impossible future facing the Tour de France. This year's race is taking place under furnace-like conditions that can't fairly be characterized as extreme any longer. The French countryside is not getting any less combustible. The sun is not abating. There's nothing the Tour can do but manage the effects. The show must go on; the show can't go on. How will the Tour de France adapt to a world on fire? Is that even possible? It was clear this year's race would be affected by the brutal heat before Stage 1 even started. NetCompany-Ineos set up tubs of ice for their riders to dunk their arms in ahead of the time trial, while Alpecin had their riders go to town on frozen carbohydrate gels. That was in Barcelona, when it was in the relatively balmy low 90s. Rumors flew through the press room about the truncation or cancelation of the stages to come, but the Tour went on untouched. By Tuesday, with the race rolling through the Pyrenean foothills, it was pushing 100 degrees, where it will stay through the weekend. Fans were blasted with a firehose at the finish line in Foix. NBC measured the pavement temperature north of 140 °F. EF sports director Charly Wegelius told me he hasn't worn socks since the race started. Most riders are barely poking their heads out of air-conditioned team buses in the mornings, while the AC on Visma's bus broke.

What’s the sickest action sequence you’ve ever witnessed on screen? I’ll give you five. There’s the tea parlor shootout at the top of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, of course, as well as Jackie Chan’s multi-level shopping mall free-for-all at the close of Police Story. William Friedkin constructed more than a few throughout his career, none better than the stalking-slashing set-piece at the climax of The Hunted. I still don’t know how John Frankenheimer made Ronin’s Paris sedan chase without killing anyone. Ditto the first tanker assault in Mad Max: Fury Road, that symphony of soaring bodies and spiky, speeding metal. By my count, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious adds at least three to the canon. Filmed in Bangkok and set “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” The Furious brings together some of the greatest living martial arts actors from China, Thailand, and Indonesia for 113 minutes of nonstop bodily annihilation. People fight in nightclubs, in open-air market halls, in ice freezers, in police stations, and off the side of a truck. It quite literally kicks ass. The set-up for all this fun is typically grim. A mute plumber named Wang Wei (Chinese direct-to-video superstar Xie Mao) is about to send his young daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) back to her grandparents in China, when the girl is tricked and kidnapped by a human trafficking ring. When the police prove less than helpful, Wang goes in search of them himself, a rescue-and-revenge mission that brings him in (literal) contact with Navin (male model and judo champion Joe Taslim), an independent journalist searching for his wife, who disappeared while investigating the very same trafficking operation. 

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't panicking. "I don't think it's anything drastic. It's just a play here, a play there, a call here, a call there," he said after Atlanta's 88-83 loss to Golden State on Saturday, his team's fifth straight loss. "I think as soon as we have one game where we shoot it the way we normally shoot it, I think then we'll be through the struggles that we're seeing right now." I won't pretend this circular logic is especially satisfying, but it's true that a coach can only do so much when their team is shooting the way Atlanta is right now. Across those five losses, the Dream shot 26 percent from three and just 38.4 percent from the field—not what you want. It was a bit of a surprise that the team won't have any players starting in the All-Star Game later this month, but the snub has not exactly powered the team's wing duo to greatness. Allisha Gray is shooting 16 percent from three and 35.2 percent from the field in this losing stretch. Rhyne Howard, a stout defender, found herself on the wrong end of a couple of Gabby Williams masterclasses in the past couple weeks. Smesko might feel calm because he knows the team isn't in its fully realized form yet. Brionna Jones, expected to start at center, has been out recovering from knee surgery she had before the start of the season. We'll soon find out how much of Atlanta's problems are due to plain incompleteness: Jones was a full participant in Tuesday's Dream practice. 

For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round-of-16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anything other than something we've never seen before feels, well, terrible. Messi spent the first 79 minutes of the match misplaying passes, dribbling to nowhere, missing yet another penalty—boy, am I glad that he made his two penalties in the 2022 World Cup final, or we'd never hear the end of it—and watching helplessly as Egypt hunkered down, rode goalie Mostafa Shobeir through some incredible saves, and scored not once but twice. Seventy-nine minutes had gone, and while Argentina controlled the balance of play, the scoreboard didn't lie. Egypt had been deadlier and more efficient with its chances, while Argentina looked out of ideas and, crucially, almost out of time. That's the thing about having Messi on your team, though: Until the final whistle blows, there is always time. In this case, all it took was four minutes for Messi to do what he has done more than perhaps any player in the history of soccer: rescue his team from the jaws of defeat through sheer willpower and otherworldly talent. In four minutes, Messi roared to life. All it took was one dribble where he looked like Young Messi—or at least the Younger Messi who dismantled poor Josko Gvardiol at the 2022 World Cup—to wake him up. That dribble didn't end in a goal, but fast-forward just a few second later and his talent would make the difference. The first Argentina goal was actually the kind of assist that Messi doesn't do all that often, which makes it all the more entertaining to watch. This was just a simple cross, cutting inside on his left from the right wing before lobbing it at a perfectly timed Cristian Romero run, which allowed the Tottenham captain to head the ball with enough power to get through Shobeir's save attempt.

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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more. Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business. Your letters:

On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards, watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at Defenders Academy, a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court.  Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a courtroom has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her back to share her talents with public defenders. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound: Players are probably less likely to do a racismo if their lips can be easily read in the moment, potentially heading off the kind of paralytic he-said-he-said that protected Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni in his racism incident with Vinícius last season. Alas, FIFA's anti-racism protocols hold no sway in the real world, and they especially have no jurisdiction in the realm of good old-fashioned politician racism. Enter Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, a member of the country's center-left Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico party, who posted (and later deleted) a brutally offensive rant directed at Kylian Mbappé following Paraguay's 1-0 loss to France. As translated by The Madrid Zone: This brute hasn't even learned to write. Instead of breastmilk, he grew up sucking on coconuts, and the most educated creatures he ever heard were chimpanzees. You should've given him the middle finger, Orlando Gill (Paraguay GK). A colonized Cameroonian, pretending to be French, resentful, newly rich, arrogant, and ugly. He was nervous and scared to death all game, like his whole team. They didn't even manage to score a single goal, until they got lucky with a penalty. The only thing many of us blame the team for is not giving him a full-handed slap at the end of the game. I'm not even a football fan.