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ALPE D'HUEZ, France — Roughly halfway up the final climb of Stage 19, and roughly five hours before the riders hit the base, our car indulged the thick snarl of besotted fans who wanted to do the wave with us. This slowed us across a critical speed threshold, beyond which our car was no longer something worth avoiding but rather something worth rocking. I'd seen videos of cars getting shaken the night before, and hoped to get shaken myself, though I was not prepared for how jarring and violent it felt in the car, as if we were pebbles and the hooting mass of jolly Europeans was the flood. This was Alpe d'Huez, the most legendary and chaotic arena in cycling. There is nothing like Alpe d'Huez in all of sports. FranceTV reported that 600,000 people slammed onto the sides of the Alpe, the most dedicated arriving over a week ago, the stragglers on foot and on bikes after French cops shut down car traffic more than 24 hours before the race. Alpe d'Huez is 13.8 kilometers long at an 8.1 percent grade, though the important number to know is 21. That's the number of hairpin corners, which compresses the climb like the innards of an accordion and turn it into a natural arena. In a sport whose operative spatial property is diffusion, the Alpe's tortuous nature gives fans the rare luxury of density. This year, Tour organizers made the prospect of pilgrimage more enticing by running Stage 19 up the main path, then running Stage 20 up the Col de Sarenne on the backside and having riders once again finish on the final four kilometers of the traditional Alpe. Offered a rare two-for-one deal, fans obliged and packed onto Alpe by the hundreds of thousands. This is part of what I mean when I say there's nothing like this in sports: a crowd six times the size of those in the biggest traditional stadia, distributed across nine miles of road, inches away from the best riders in the world, and it's all free. In the summer of the $10,000 Knicks ticket and the heinously expensive World Cup, the Tour de France's financial accessibility stands out even further. But what fans save in money, they sacrifice in convenience, since the logistics of watching a stage Alpe d'Huez require a serious level of dedication. You only do something like this if you really care about it.

There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture for the possibility that Trump would not so much grow into the job as be transformed by its sheer prestige into a totally different type of person—not just chastened by the awesome responsibility of it all, but changed by it in a way that forced him to become human in all the ways that he had spent his life avoiding. This was embarrassing even then, and seems more so after a decade of Trump-centric national humiliation and decline. It's easy enough to understand as a sort of elite coping mechanism; no one really knew what to expect from the installation of one of the dumbest and worst men this country has ever produced into its highest office, although it was natural to hope the outcome might be something other than "exactly what you would expect to happen in those circumstances." It is perhaps more easily and correctly understood as an expression of just how much that elite cohort believed in the majesty of the edifice they'd constructed around the shabby, brutal business of American politics. There might be some dead-enders still holding out for a Grinch-type outcome, there, but after a decade in Trump's fragrant shadow it's clear that things broke the other way—every institution and tradition and office held up as grand and permanent rapidly and readily debased and degraded itself in Trump's image, or in his honor. They could not believe that this office might become as stupid and small as he has made it, because they'd worked so hard and for so long to make it so large. But what was implicit in the desecrations and derelictions of his first term is explicit and thuddingly literal in his second; he is literally supergluing shit onto the walls of the Oval Office and kicking everyone off his lawn. In every sense, the White House will require a gut renovation once he's finally extricated from it. There's just too much grease and gilt on all of it now.

DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history.  Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the roughest type of fucking animals you could ever deal with,” because of their Sam Maguire Cup-or-bust standard. The star-laden squad relies most on David Clifford, a three-time player of the year and the only player of his generation that comes up in GOAT conversations.  All of Ireland expects Mayo to lose.

Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshuffled Eastern Conference. Can't say I understand it on any level: narrative, on-court, commercial, or otherwise. Perhaps it has something to with James's long-standing belief in cumulative star talent rather than a specific mesh of skillsets; remember when he thought Russell Westbrook would work well alongside him? Perhaps he's sympathetic to Jaylen Brown, and is picking up a sword in the anti-"analytics" battle for the game's soul. But this is certainly not his best route to winning a fifth title. His most talented teammate, Joel Embiid, played 38 games in the last regular season. Maybe James was really enamored with one or two of his performances in last season's playoffs, but there are more medically sound bets to make when it comes to a late-career title hunt. Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe are spry young guards, and they'll be a delight with James in transition, but neither is the sort of knockdown off-ball shooter that optimizes James in the halfcourt. I look forward to the facial expressions he'll make the first time a Brown iso fritters away the end of a close game. The Sixers' starting lineup will leave lots of weak points for opposing offenses to attack—do not tell me that 32-year-old Embiid will be anchoring a championship defense. Again, there's a lot of talent on this roster; I just have no idea how it will all fit together. That's Nick Nurse's job, if he can keep it.

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed, the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams. You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support. You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams. Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff, like winning some intermediate sprints, wearing one of the jerseys for a day or two, or simply being visible. Variety is one part of what makes the Tour's competitive landscape so well-tended; the other is scarcity. While every team will enter the race with different goals, there's not enough to go around. The fun part is seeing which prizes each team pursues, who that puts them in conflict or alliance with, and how their plans are forced to evolve over the three weeks of racing. What does a successful Tour look like? Every team has a different answer. EF is the perfect team through which to understand how complicated and intriguing this all is. Unlike UAE or Visma, EF wasn't going to target the yellow jersey. But they're also stronger than the bottom-feeders, and as such have larger ambitions than merely notable participation. For example, Lotto has had a good Tour despite having only won some combativity awards, simply because they keep putting riders in doomed breakaways and having them hold on longer than chasing teams expect. Last year, EF had a dream Tour, with Ben Healy taking a stage win, finishing 10th overall, spending some time in the yellow jersey, and winning the overall combativity prize. This time around, Healy didn't come into the Tour fully healthy, and though EF had superstar rider Richard Carapaz back, he was also recovering from surgery and couldn't realistically target another Tour podium. So it was time to win some stages.

Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003

My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of his fingers, as if she is breakable and precious. The bodies embrace haphazardly, but the hands are patient and deliberate. The lovers were modeled after the adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But I could never feel anything doomed or sinful about the pair. All I saw was the tension between the hesitancy and the urgency of a first kiss—the feeling of fear and desire all wrapped up in one.  The Kiss was my first introduction to the works of Rodin. From then on, I became fascinated by the stone figures Rodin seemed to capture in motion, as well as the depths of feeling he built from the subtle details of the body. My first summer in Philadelphia, I spent many afternoons journeying to the Rodin Museum, sitting in the sculpture garden or wandering the small rooms to take in the subtleties. Just like with The Kiss, my eyes are always drawn to the hands.  Writing on his weeks spent observing Rodin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

Jimothy crept into our lives like any good cryptid—as a blurry, scuttling thing. Kiana Hall, the Seattle local whose firsthand footage resulted in Jimothy's newfound fame, first thought she had spotted a cat running under a car. But upon closer inspection, the creature was no feline. "I was seeing some kind of gray, fluffy creature that was shaped sort of like an orb with really long legs," Hall said in an interview with Reuters. Hall's vertical video captures the creature, which she christened Jimothy, scampering enigmatically across a desiccated lawn. Although the animal's coat and black mask identifies them clearly as a raccoon, Jimothy is undeniably orb-shaped, as if a planet suddenly sprouted a cluster of legs so that it might prance about to unsettle and delight Seattleites lucky enough to glimpse them. The raccoon has since become unofficially canonized as a local saint, inspiring various effigies in the media of mural, mathematics, medieval marginalia, and even a Mariners in-game cameo. Although Jimothy's adoring fans use he/him for the raccoon, Jimothy's sex is unknown. "If a video emerges where Jimothy is standing on his (or her!) hind legs and facing forward, then we might be able to determine Jimothy's sex," Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email. So until we are fortunate to be flashed by Jimothy, we're all just guessing. The reason behind Jimothy's distinct shape, however, is more decipherable. When Kent Morton, a veterinarian at Compassionate Care Animal Hospital in Michigan who co-hosts the podcast Vet Med For Idiots By Idiots, first saw images of Jimothy, he felt he could diagnose the raccoon. Jimothy appears to have a congenital issue called short spine syndrome. "The soft tissues in the spine will fuse the vertebrae, and that's what gives them the short neck appearance," Morton said. "It's a very distinctive condition."

I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent. Yeah, that guy. He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah. Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man is subject to quarterly declarations of a loneliness epidemic and, in a fun new twist, mandatory testosterone tests, there's basically nobody better suited to probe the hollow inner workings of modern masculinity than McBride. He’s had a lot of practice, after all. As a screenwriter and performer, he’s demonstrated a particular genius for understanding the Dumb Guy in a way that only a really smart one can. That McBride can write is not in dispute, but I’m not sure what, exactly, to make of this book or his intentions behind it.  The difficulty I found in reading and responding to Thrilling Tales is that Danny McBride, as a concept, already exists in our collective societal brain. (If you're looking for the obligatory Kenny Powers mention, it’s already over.) This isn’t a fame issue, though. Celebrities turning to fiction may be a fun recent micro-trend which the publishing industry is using to provide something of a higher audience baseline, but it is historically a pretty normal endeavor. David Duchovny cranked out Bucky F*cking Dent in 2016, and Carrie Fisher gifted us Postcards From the Edge three decades before that, and somewhere in the middle Hugh Laurie wrote The Gun Seller, or rather, as his most devout readers know it, Tout Est Sous Contrôle. No, the circle I struggled to square is that this is a book that, in many instances, feels like it was written by somebody with clear talent who recognized that writing a book is simply a thing they can do. It’s not laziness, to be clear: The stories here do not read like recycled character sketches from a writer’s room scratch pad. You can hear in McBride's book press tour that he wanted these short stories to exist as short stories. 

Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling novelist Paul Tremblay, author of the new Dead But Dreaming Of Electric Sheep, onto the show this week. The idea was that, with no top-of-the-news sports to talk about, we could talk about basically anything. And so we did. The episode begins with talk about Paul's prostate cancer experience, complete with thematically appropriate Dreamcatcher comps, an arachnid surgical robot, and a surgeon no-selling his pre-operation attempt at a joke. It is a good deal funnier than it had any right to be, even before the phrase "penile rehab" was spoken aloud. We also spoke about his experience getting roasted by teenagers while continuing to teach high school math after authoring several bestselling horror novels, what it's like to sue OpenAI, and what his own lengthy deposition in that case revealed about big AI's legal strategy and effectively nonexistent capacity to read a room. We also discussed his new book, invented a verb form of Weekend At Bernie's, and talked about the thrills and relatively mild indignities of the contemporary book tour.