NowLoop

There are many ways to frame what I'm about to say, and I'm sure someone funnier and smarter than me could find the perfect way to really maximize the impact of this sentence. I, however, think the bold-faced truth, with no embellishment, is the funniest way to deliver this news, and so: For the third straight time, the Italian national team has failed to qualify to the World Cup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEKZd_BfUjU Thanks to two losses to Norway in UEFA qualifier group play, Italy botched its initial qualification process for the 2026 World Cup, capped in embarrassing 4-1 blowout fashion back in November, at home no less. That meant the Italians had to navigate two one-leg knockout matches to keep the hopes of a return to the World Cup alive. The Azzurri did dispatch Northern Ireland 2-0 in Bergamo on Mar. 26, while Bosnia and Herzegovina beat Wales in a penalty shootout on the same day. That set up Tuesday's win-and-you're-in showdown in Zenica, in front of a rowdy Bosnia crowd that was no less fervent even in the face of a capacity reduction handed down by FIFA due to previous incidents in a match against Romania last year.

When Defector decided to get in on the market for parenting advice, there were many questions we had to consider. After all, there is no shortage of content on parenting at the moment: Oscar-winning movies about the prolonged effects of marijuana usage and guerrilla warfare on fatherhood. Oscar-winning movies on the tragedy of Elizabethan-era motherhood…

The WNBA is still a fairly new league in both geologic and relative terms, and so the news that the Connecticut Sun had been sold to the folks who own the Houston Rockets and would move to Texas after this season created minimal stir, despite some ambient stink on the deal. WNBA franchises have moved before; the one that played in Houston won the league's first four championships, fielded some of the early WNBA's biggest stars, and was one of the sport's most iconic organizations before it disbanded. That was in 2008, although it feels much longer ago. Today, the league's franchises, established and expansion, are being bought up by NBA owners, and Tilman Fertitta, who owns the Rockets and is the United States' ambassador to Italy and San Marino, evidently needs something else to do. There was little fuss or muss, and, despite some high-powered threats, no lawsuits about the sale, and no demands for the team's history to remain in Connecticut. The franchise belonged to the Mohegan Tribe, and they could, and did, sell to whatever party they preferred. Nobody made much of a stink about the records when the Orlando Miracle moved to Connecticut to become the Sun, either. It was just another instance of this strange business conducting business as usual.  But it's a funny thing about sports history—for all the hard numbers underpinning it, it is generally much more contingent on negotiations and dealmaking than it is on facts. The Seattle Soon-To-Be-Super-Again-Sonics organization will rise from the crypt in the next round of NBA expansion, and will both replace and supplant the Sonics that were skirted off to Oklahoma City. The citizens of Seattle demanded the name, team colors, and records in exchange for not suing owner Clay Bennett six generations into the future back then, and Bennett didn't care about any of that extraneous paperwork. And so the Thunder were for all intents and purposes an expansion team when they relocated to OKC, unless you knew the context. This despite having the same front office, coaches, players, and staff by whom and with which that history was made. Kevin Durant began his career with the Sonics in '07-08 and continued it with the Thunder the next season. It wasn't a trade that moved him from one team to the other, but it was a deal.

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now. Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

C.B. Bucknor has got to be the only person on Earth wishing that Angel Hernandez was still an active major league umpire. Ever since Hernandez abruptly retired in 2024, the search for baseball's new bad-call bogeyman has been on. It seems that the spotlight is settling on Bucknor, who has long matched Hernandez in inaccuracy if not infamy. Over the weekend, Bucknor became the sullen face of the ABS era when baseball fans discovered how much fun it is to watch an umpire get humiliated in front of a packed stadium over and over again. Bucknor had six of his strike calls overturned while behind the plate during Saturday's Red Sox–Reds game, including two would-be third strikes on back-to-back challenges. Bucknor was the first-base umpire in Tuesday night's game between the Brewers and Rays, and managed to step in it even without ABS looking over his shoulder. In the sixth inning, Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers hit an infield single. There was a bit of confusion following the play, because Bucknor had called Bauers out despite the throw to first sailing far wide of Rays first baseman Jonathan Aranda's glove. As Bauers was walking back to first base, Aranda decided to tag him just in case he had initially missed the bag, at which point Bucknor decided that, yes, Bauers had failed to touch first and was therefore out. The only problem was that Bauers had clearly touched first. I don't mean that he grazed the corner of the bag while running at a sprint; he put his whole foot in the middle of the damn base. It is not possible to touch first more solidly or obviously than this:

JAŸ-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he’s been some kind of recluse the past few years, absent from the public imagination—he’s been doing evil billionaire things, laundering the NFL’s post-Kaepernick reputation through the grandiose production of the Super Bowl halftime, escaping Diddy’s dragnet, and somehow showing up as part of a fraud charge levied against the Uncle Nearest whiskey brand. Music-wise, he’s been quiet: no album, no single, no concert, no significant output since co-starring on Jay Electronica’s 2020 album A Written Testimony. The last time anyone was talking about him in a musical context was 2022, with the verse he did on DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” which was fine but mostly notable for being long. But he’s back now, with a splashy new interview in GQ, headlining The Roots Picnic in Philadelphia and a couple of Yankee Stadium shows in the summer to satisfy our cultural love of anniversaries that are multiples of five. 2026 marks the 30-year anniversary of his classic debut album Reasonable Doubt, and 25-year anniversary of The Blueprint, the album that solidified his place as one of greatest rappers ever, if not the greatest.  The Yankee Stadium shows will no doubt be grand affairs: The online ticket queues clocked in at over 800,000 people for each, and of course sold out immediately; they’ve added another date they’re calling “extra innings.” They will likely include some expected special guests (Mary J. Blige, Eminem, possibly a Jaz-O reunion) and a few that might be a little more surprising: Nas, Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Slick Rick, and Q-Tip, who all feature in some way across these two albums. I don’t know, it’s JAŸ-Z; he might bring out Barack Obama and Oprah. People will spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to go scream every word of his songs back at the man and feel the euphoria of celebration. And Hov will make a few million dollars. Everyone involved will get what they want. 

Tiger Woods was “sweating profusely” and appeared “lethargic and slow” after his crash last weekend, according to an arrest affidavit released Tuesday. The golfer told investigators with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office that he had taken “a few” prescription drugs earlier in the day, and a deputy later found two hydrocodone pills in Woods’s left pocket. Wood was…

In the first of the recent rambling Instagram Live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a Bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkward moments of silence while Ivey flips back and forth and sniffs and mutters. It's a lot of very tedious work for almost no payoff: Every passage Ivey selects is a threat of damnation, and the most he ever wrings out of his selections, by way of translating them into plain language, is a superficial and increasingly whiney exhortation. You guys, don't you see how this further goes to show that you are going to go to hell? He winds himself up like this, so that by the end of the video his voice has risen half an octave or more, as if he has been waiting for some tangible sign of breakthrough and feels his audience is to blame for not having produced one, perhaps due to their inner hypocrisy. But it's a pretty friendly audience, judging by the comments: If recent studies about sycophancy in AI chatbots reveal anything broader about online psychosis, Ivey is absorbing a dangerously potent wallop of behavioral reinforcement. He spent several hours over the weekend preaching to this crowd, much of it from the interior of his car, hammering the same talking points about how to avoid eternal damnation, not refining his message too well but certainly gaining steam through repetition. It's not surprising then that some of the confessions Ivey struggled to articulate in the making of his first video are shouted with authority in the most recent one, which came after his employers decided they'd seen enough of this shit. "God saved me from a life of fornication," Ivey professes early in the first video, in an affectless bass, looking away from the camera. "He saved me from a life of drunkenness, he saved me from a life of, um," and here there is a pregnant pause before Ivey completes the sentence with "pornography." Later in the session, repeating the same point, Ivey record-scratches on that pornography bit, stares blankly, and then moves to another thought. By Monday's video, he'd gotten the hang of it. "I was a fornicator! I was a pornography addict! And I used to get drunk! That's all I knew!"

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, guest host Dave McKenna is talking about cowboy hats, music, high-risk eating, and catch phrases. What an honor this is! Other than initials I have nothing in common with Drew, the legendary Funbag founder and a real man of letters. But now somebody messed up and let me have the keys to his column. I’m reminded of the time the Exxon Valdez was commandeered by Captain Hazelwood. Let’s commence this voyage.  Your letters:

He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old took the mound for his new old team's fourth game of the 2026 season. I had to snap a picture to capture the moment. I'm searching for a more interesting word than "surreal" and coming up short. Seeing "VERLANDER" and 35 on that specific road uniform takes me back to a completely different version of myself—a confused student who has yet to learn basically any lesson she'll consider important by the time she gets to age 30. An athlete's life advances at the same pace as your own, but Verlander's career has taken such a strange loop back around that it's left me a little dizzy. He's been to Houston, and then the operating room, then Queens, then Houston again, and then San Francisco before signing this one-year deal. It kind of feels a little arrogant, after what's become such a long and varied career, to even make the claim that JV has returned "home." Detroit isn't the only city that can claim him.