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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, Justin answers a question about discipline.

Well, that mystery has been solved. Kyle Shanahan was fishing around for his dropped phone while driving at 20 miles per hour when he crossed into the other lane and hit a car. There. Everyone satisfied? Great. Show yourselves out, and have a nice day. Well, no. Of course not. Shanahan, the coach and chief architect of the San Francisco 49ers, has been and remains off work for an extended period of time because of the crash that neither he nor the officials and general population of Palo Alto, Calif., thought was noteworthy enough to mention for 11 days. He has a concussion, broken ribs, a broken nose, 40 stitches across his face and nearly lost an eye from the deployed airbag, which among other things means that he cannot perform his very public and vital duties protecting the nation from the absence of one-thirty-second of football. And, well, nobody's required to buy any of that story, even Shanahan's belated acknowledgement that he was the one at fault rather than the 21-year-old woman driving the other car. These are not times in which anyone is or necessarily should be trusted; lying is everywhere, and liars are both prevalent and prolific. The biggest reason nobody's required to buy any of it is because of the 11 days when neither Shanahan, the 49ers, the Palo Alto police, nor TMZ's sprawling army of camera sleuths felt it worthy of mention. In doing so, they violated the basic rule of information control: The less you provide, the less control you have, because gossip abhors a vacuum, and the public will fill in the details we need to have in order to understand it in whatever way best suits our personalities, preconceptions, and sick senses of humor.

The recently concluded World Cup was the shining example of FIFA president Gianni Infantino's particular brand of evil. It was nakedly greedy, nakedly corrupt, nakedly ugly, and also totally awesome. Infantino's bet was that he could openly screw everyone—fans, teams, referees, ear-havers, even the sport itself—and could still get away with it simply because soccer is too good. As expected, he was proven right. And unsurprisingly, he's already trying to push things even further. On Tuesday, The Times reported that Infantino's latest plan is to sell the World Cup to private equity investors, all under the guise of "growing the game," which not so coincidentally involves growing his own bank account. Specifically, Infantino's plan would include FIFA setting up a company, tentatively named FIFA Forward Enterprise, that would handle the commercial rights to the World Cup. FIFA would retain majority control of the FFE company, and each of the 211 member associations would get a stake reportedly worth around $20 million each. The rest would be sold off to investors, around 21 percent of the company, who would almost certainly see an immense return even on the planned $10 billion infusion from their investments. The search for investors is, of course, tainted to fuck already with Trumpworld, as FIFA is reportedly marking Jared Kushner's brother Joshua and his private equity company Thrive Capital as primary investors for the FFE project. But hey, remember that $20 million? Eh? Everybody wins! Right? Well, sort of. The dirty secret of FIFA's current set-up is that it is very easy to bribe quite a few of the 211 organizations. Not in the Sepp Blatter fashion of literally giving them money under the table. That's gauche in Infantino's FIFA. Instead, the money is promised over the table and with all of the good "growing the game" intentions he can fit into his media appearances and statements. For many of FIFA's member associations, $20 million is a lot of money. (For others, such as the UEFA associations, it is a drop in the bucket.) Infantino is able to buy the votes he needs—plans such as this FFE gambit are subject simply to a simple majority from FIFA members—to incorporate his plans, but simple mathematics show how weak his actual support is. Tallying up that $20 million for each of the 211 countries comes out to around $4.2 billion, leaving almost $16 billion of FIFA's valuation of the prospective FFE company ($20 billion) up for grabs between the world soccer governing body and those pesky investors.

Some people are fans of the New York Giants. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Giants. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: WHAT’S IN THE TENT?! I BET THERE’S FREE CANDY IN THERE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1fJjaYNclo

I think it would be really fascinating to know Kyle Kuzma. The man loves to stride confidently right up to the very threshold of insight... Let’s be real…the CBA makes sure owners, PE funds and outside investors can eat off NBA team equity, but the players driving the ratings and the merch are treated like short‑term contractors. [...] ...only to suddenly throw a complicated mixtape-style step-back move and fire up an airball.

When you turn your personal life into your business, the lines between boyfriend and coworker can start getting fuzzy pretty fast. How do you handle conflict with your coworker if you know their flossing habits? When things begin to fall apart with a boyfriend, what’s a microinfluencer girlboss with a pair of non-refundable plane tickets supposed to do?  Life decisions like these call for expert analysis, which is why we called back the Scam Goddess herself, Laci Mosley.  https://youtu.be/YgYTYa2Gsek

If you are anything like me, you probably have a neck—a neck you take for granted. Maybe you do not think often about having a neck, given said neck's relatively unobtrusive placement below your head and out of your line of sight. Maybe you are trying to look at your neck right now, pressing your chin against your neck, which remains obscured below your chin, which you also can't see. And yet your ability to even attempt to see your neck is made possible by your neck. Neck-less animals such as valiant Jimothy or every jellyfish have no such rotational privilege. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that science has long neglected the humble neck. "There have been a multitude of studies on the development and evolution of the head and pectoral girdle but little on the region in between," scientists wrote in a 2012 paper about the vertebrate neck in the Journal of Anatomy. Only in the last 30 years has scientific interest in the neck awakened, the researchers write. We here at Defector do not wish to neglect the neck any longer. So please gather round for a long-overdue neck report, because there is breaking neck news. "Think that fishes and amphibians don’t have necks? Think again"

Patrick has spent the last three weeks following the Tour de France with our friends from Escape Collective. This post was originally published on Escape Collective on July 27. Defector readers can now get a six-month free trial of Escape Collective, with ad-free and independent coverage that goes beyond the Tour de France. Claim the offer here. There was a point there, about three hours into a five-hour drive in 105 degree heat on the back of an enormous cauliflower, where it started getting old. And then, three things happened. In the space of 20 seconds, there was a sad-faced middle-aged man in a kind of regal medieval gown with fur sleeves and cuffs, standing a few meters away from a hauntingly still figure in a full fox suit complete with head; a few meters later, a five-year-old cosplayed as Tadej Pogacar, full UAE yellow kit and all.This was not an atypical series of sightings, I should stress. But its barrage did snap me out of my funk and back to the very strange reality in which I found myself. After years surveying the Tour de France promotional caravan as a sociological phenomenon, I was now in the thick of it, on the Tour de France’s hottest day, on the race’s funniest vehicle.

Listen to enough sports podcasts, and eventually you will hear someone spit the name of every podcaster's greatest enemy: the aggregators. Oh, how the fellas who talk about sports into a mic for a living love to complain about the aggregators. Don't aggregate this! yelps Zach Lowe, before sharing a mild opinion about the Toronto Raptors. Listen up, aggregators, I am not reporting this, groans Bill Simmons, before guessing where LeBron James might sign. I need to be careful here, because of the aggregators, murmurs Brian Windhorst, before doling out a trade rumor. These men are beset on all sides by the dreaded aggregators! But who are the aggregators, and what exactly are they doing to these podcasters? More often than not, "the aggregators" is a phrase used to describe various social media accounts that circulate quotes from podcast episodes for the sake of baiting engagement. A recent tweet from Yahoo Sports acts as an exemplar of the form: a graphic with Bill Simmons's face above something he said on a recent podcast episode about how the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers might end up being just as bad as the 2012 Lakers. "This is bullshit," Simmons angrily tweeted in response. "We went thru all the scenarios for how the Philly signing could play out on Friday’s pod good and bad. I thought Yahoo was trying to be a real place? Don’t you guys pay respectable writers and podcasters to do content? But you also do fake clickbait crap?"

Now that LeBron James has found his newest version of joy with the Fanatics 76ers and the nation has finished chewing over all the ramifications thereof, be they ridiculous and absurd or merely improbable and stupid, the discourse cries out for a new main character in the hired-and-fired/signed-and-resigned marketplace. And there is only one name left that anyone finds appealingly rumormongerable: Stephen Curry. As in: "Why didn't the Warriors get LeBron to help Steph win that last ring?" Or: "Why didn't the Warriors get someone, really, anyone to help Steph win that last ring?" And: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, why does Mike Dunleavy Jr. still have his general manager's job?" And also: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, is owner Joe Lacob an idiot, and if so, for what specific reason?" And finally: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, shouldn't they trade him as an act of basic human decency?" This all puts Curry at the center of the story to an extent that raises an additional question, which is more or less, "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, why isn't he demanding that signing/firing/trade?"