NowLoop

The thing that has most consistently awed me as I've plunged into Brazilian funk is just how deep the genre is. In its earliest days, funk really was just about as simple as one particular rhythmic sample laid atop existing dancy hits. But the genre's explosion since then has been downright Cambrian, incorporating new rhythms and constantly birthing new styles, oftentimes finding growth by devouring techniques and characteristics from musical traditions within and outside of Brazil—a voracious cultural cannibalism that would make Oswald de Andrade and Caetano Veloso proud. For the uninitiated, funk's enormity and perpetual churn may seem intimidating, like hearing about a nice swimming hole, heading over for a leisurely dip, only to find yourself before raging whitewater rapids. But what I've learned is that if you're willing to make the leap of faith and dive right in, you will not be disappointed by the wild ride it takes you on. Sure, I have probably lost multiple decades of lifetime aural functionality by playing this gloriously damaging music at dangerous volumes for hours and hours, and my every doctor's appointment threatens to include a trip to the ER before I get a chance to explain why my heart now beats to the rhythm of tamborzão, and while I have come to learn about 18 words of Portuguese, the bulk of them are merely synonyms for various reproductive organs. Nevertheless, I have loved getting swept along in funk, going on a journey that has led me to places I never would've imagined, many of which I wouldn't have even thought I'd like so much before getting there. With that in mind, I figured I'd share some of the things I've come across recently, to maybe help guide a curious fellow traveler.

Where its harsh, cold plains stretch toward the Uruguay River, the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is blanketed by the pampas, expansive fields at odds with the sandy beaches and verdant mountains typically associated with Brazil. In fact, Rio Grande do Sul is a bit like the American West: built on settler mythology and Indigenous blood, conquered by men with a thirst for profit, and boasting of that vast kind of nature, big skies and endless plains. Also, there are cowboys.  A South American cowboy is called a gaucho. If, in North America, cowboys come clad in tall boots and tall hats, on the pampas their hats and boots are stouter, they wear neck scarves, and drink mate (a beverage enjoyed nationally in Argentina and Uruguay, but regionally in Brazil; we call it chimarrão). The gaucho is, finally, a virile man—a descendant of those combative settlers, a rugged horserider. Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, one of the preeminent historians of the state, describes the gaucho ideal as “the brave horseman of the undulating plains, the valiant centaur of the pampas.” The Brazilian South is a largely conservative region, and strikingly white compared to the rest of the country, due to European and particularly German colonies established in the 19th century. It enjoys a place of prominence in the Brazilian collective imagination, perhaps nowhere more prominent than in the south’s own estimation—it has bred separationist, racist and homophobic ideas, and a psyche addled by European envy. Past presidents from Rio Grande do Sul include João Goulart, the last democratically elected president before the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1964, and dictators—some, like Getúlio Vargas, more popular than others, like Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. Gisele Bündchen is from there, too. 

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, Ray answers a pair of questions on parent peer pressure.

It is a rare occasion when baseball players actually land any solid punches in a bench-clearing brawl, and this clip will be no different. No heavyweight blows connected cleanly in Tuesday's bout between Braves starter Reynaldo Lopez and Angels outfielder Jorge Soler. It was pretty rowdy nonetheless. Keep an eye out for a flying tackle of Soler by Atlanta manager Walt Weiss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg4M02JzKOg Soler had homered off of Lopez in his first at-bat and gotten plunked in his second. That, one might think, would be the end of it, honor restored all around in whatever silly red-assed code required it. But in the fifth inning, Lopez sailed a pitch to the backstop. He said there was no intent behind it, and that's plausible enough, given it allowed a runner to move into scoring position in a close game. Soler wasn't having it. "I asked him if everything was OK and the answer he gave me, I didn’t like it," Soler said afterward. "That’s why I went out there."

Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confessional to me. Dashboard Confessional, the final boss of 2000s emo pop, was the brainchild of Florida boy Chris Carrabba, the jet-black-haired (and sideburned) original tattooed sensitive guy, with his Abercrombie chic of tiny shirts, tight jeans, and a silly armband. Brooding with a sleeve of tats, you know he might be trouble, but in that irresistibly wounded, emotionally expressive way. "Yes," your brain tells you, "I can fix him." Dashboard formed in 1999 and put out their first album the following year, but their breakthrough came with their sophomore effort, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, which turned 25 last month. The year is 2001, and Carrabba and Dashboard Confessional have become an MTV staple. "Screaming Infidelities," a year-old song that had already appeared on their first album, is suddenly a big hit. The band has begun to ride the line between teeny-bop twee punk for the TRL set and the go-to punchline of every derisive joke about the cloying excesses of the fake genre that is emo, while simultaneously being a quality band with great, karaoke-ready pop songs. For my part, I am a 12-year-old boy, and they are the band I don't want anyone to know I am listening to ... even as I listen to them all the time.

Well, what is it? According to the official 2026 MLB rules, a strike—in isolation, absent swings and foul tips—is called when "any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone." The strike zone is duly defined, in a long-winded and broadly unpunctuated phrase, as "that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap," which "shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball." The definition, handed first to human umpires, is filled with human imprecision. Reasonable people may disagree on the exact location of the "hollow beneath the kneecap." How precisely middle is the "midpoint," often defined by fans as the letters on the jersey? Would a given batter's midpoint vary over the course of a season should they start adhering to high-waisted fashion trends? With the implementation of the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system, these ambiguities have been quashed. After a rigorous independent height-measuring process that shrunk batters across the league, ABS now shirks the minutia of calf-to-thigh proportions in favor of defining the top of the strike zone at precisely 53.5 percent of a hitter's height, and the bottom at 27 percent of the player's height. So, that's that. While a human umpire may use knees and torsos as reference points, a true strike is called when any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone, which is defined as the area over home plate within a range between 27 and 53.5 percent of the batter's height.

While Hikaru Nakamura was making an ignoble sort of chess history, Javokhir Sindarov yawned. Just 12 moves into their fifth-round match at the 2026 Candidates Tournament, the 20-year-old had tied the world's second-ranked player in quite the knot, forcing Nakamura to sit and think for over an hour. Nakamura, playing with the white pieces, attacked Sindarov with the Marshall Gambit, though the Uzbek player surprised the American by castling on the 12th move. Nakamura was down two pawns and clearly not prepared for Sindarov to counter him like this, so he thought for 67 minutes and 44 seconds, only to screw up. "He just thought one hour and played the wrong move," Sindarov said afterward. "And after this I take this advantage and played very well, in my opinion." Sindarov is currently taking the 2026 Candidates by storm. He got himself into big trouble in his first match against Andrey Esipenko, only to reverse a huge time disparity and win a stunner. By the sixth round, he had already tied the record for most match wins at a Candidates with five. He has drawn three times and has yet to lose, taking an extremely impressive two-point lead into the ninth round on Wednesday. Sindarov made his Candidates debut this year as the fifth-highest ranked player at the tournament and 12th-ranked player in the world, and he beat three of the four players ranked above him on the first time through the round robin. This is one of the strongest debuts possible, and it has even caught the attention of recently self-exiled chess king Magnus Carlsen.

The most anticipated sporting event of my life was Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014: the Michigan men's basketball team playing Michigan State in Ann Arbor. I'd grown up around Big Ten basketball, but I was a newly minted Wolverine fan (and a freshman on campus). My matriculation coincided with off-the-charts hype for Michigan hoops; the Brady Hoke doldrums of the football team combined with a thrilling 2013 Final Four run at the start of an era that would send a whole bunch of recruits to the NBA. I struggled at the football games—imagine thousands of binge-drunk college kids packed into bleachers blacking out through a 3-5 conference record—but I found a kind of home in the basketball arena. You could get a spot just behind the benches, as long as you showed up early enough. The football-school culture meant that the attendees were generally more sober and less willing to let disappointment ruin their entire week. And I liked that the basketball players were instantly recognizable, without helmets or pads. For two years, I lived just a few steps from the ones in the Class of 2017, and even though that didn't make us friends or even acquaintances, you get a little boost rooting for people you see every day. The Michigan State game was the one you circled months in advance, pitting the standard-bearers of the region against a program that had recently proven it could hang at that level. For a national audience, this was No. 20 vs. No. 13, so it probably didn't feel like the game of the year. But for me it was Game 7 of the Finals. There were rules against camping out overnight, but no rules against camping out nearby. My roommate and I (who had the most conveniently located dorm) hosted a slumber party in our 200-ish-square-foot room. We fit two people in each bed, one on the futon, and two on the floor, including me. (I was feeling generous.) We woke at the crack of dawn and walked down to join the line already forming outside the closed doors of Crisler Center.

Willson Contreras has played in 121 career regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers, by dint of spending the bulk of his career in the NL Central. In 23 of those games, he has been hit by a pitch, including once when he was plunked twice. No other team has hit him more than 14 times, and the Brewers account for more than one-sixth of the 131 total plunkings he's absorbed across his 11 seasons. It's a lot. The latest instance came Monday night in Boston. Contreras, now on the Red Sox, came to the plate in the third inning with his team up a run. The first pitch from Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff, a 93-mph sinker, ran up and in and scraped Contreras's knuckles. The contact was slight enough that Brewers manager Pat Murphy asked for a video review, but a baseball to the fingers does not feel great, and Contreras was pissed. He shouted at Woodruff and stomped angrily to first; after the review, he continued woofing until an umpire and a Red Sox coach convinced him to chill. These two will probably not ever be friends: Woodruff and Contreras have faced each other 29 times, and six of those plate appearances have now ended with an HBP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjlunRII3SA

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 chefs, noogies, hoodie storage, and more. I’m back! YAYYY! And what a treat to have Dave McKenna host the Funbag last week in my stead. Let’s all give the man a round of applause, because he’s got more stories to tell than Shakespeare did. A true original. And now, your letters: