NowLoop

Three NFL players were placed on the commissioner's exempt list this past weekend: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Terrion Arnold, Denver Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper, and Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs. All three will be unable to play while they are on the list, but they still get their game checks. It's the NFL's version of paid leave. All three have been charged in criminal court. For Cooper and Jacobs, the charges are in cases that include allegations of intimate-partner violence. Arnold is charged with playing a role in a violent robbery and kidnapping in Florida. The commissioner's exempt list was a little-used tool until 2014, when video came out showing then–Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice hitting his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and fans were outraged that Rice had been suspended just two games for what happened. Since then, the list has become a tool used by the NFL to get players off the field before a full investigation can be done. It also usually involves a player getting a lot of negative media attention and typically, though not always, involves intimate-partner violence. As Mike Florio put it over at ProFootballTalk: "The league regards the move as not punishment (even though it absolutely is)."

There are tired fighters, and then there’s Moses Itauma in the ninth round of Saturday night’s heavyweight title bout against Filip Hrgovic.  With about 30 seconds left in what would be the last round of this odd but completely fascinating fight in London, the gifted but inexperienced Itauma was suddenly so gassed that he seemed utterly incapable of raising his hands above his waist, let alone defending himself from the durable Croatian veteran who was suddenly swarming him with blows from hell. Referee Howard Foster rightly called the fight and shocked the boxing world.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLGEoGQGXPg

On Friday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 3-0 ruling against Kalshi, a ruling that in theory gives states the power to regulate the "prediction market" platform. However strong that sounds, one can't fairly characterize the decision as authoritative. While the San Francisco–based court's unanimous ruling represents the most significant curtailment of the don't-call-it-gambling gambling platform, the fight between the Kalshian cohort of bloodsuckers and those who would regulate them is of a larger and stupider nature than even the nations' biggest appeals court can handle. We have to start with the odd fact that Kalshi and the Polymarket prediction market are presently regulated by the federal government. Not in any meaningful way, of course—befitting a pair of organizations that have each hired Donald Trump Jr. as a "strategic advisor"—but both are technically overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency, created in 1974, that typically governs futures markets and other forms of derivatives. The prediction markets' core argument in the case before the Ninth Circuit is that CFTC oversight is sufficient, which is to be expected given that the scope of that regulatory relationship has amounted to a big thumbs-up in exchange for whatever it costs to buy a Trump son or two. The CFTC has become a critical arm of the Donald Trump financial crimes apparatus because it has statutory authority to regulate commodities, and to classify all sorts of things that are not commodities, like cryptocurrency and online sports bets, as such. This designation lightens the regulatory burden. Securities, by contrast, are subject to stricter rules, which is part of why the Bitcoin people are obsessed with calling the obviously securitized asset digital gold.

For the first time in over 20 years, Novak Djokovic lost his first-round match at a Slam. On Sunday he fell in five sets to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, a 25-year-old clay-court specialist appearing in just his third-ever U.S. Open main draw. In other words, the sort of opponent Djokovic has made a career of dispatching, even if it did sometimes take him a leisurely five sets to do it. In this late period of his career, Djokovic has professed his love of the best-of-five format, which affords him time to recalibrate. His comeback after a hot start from a plucky youth has played out so many times that there's an air of inevitability in the stadium as he goes about his business, overcoming his aches and steadying the scoreboard. But this was not the Djokovic of matches past, and there was no air of inevitability Sunday night—just a gruesome scene. The 39-year-old labored, vomited, and cried en route to losing 7-6(5), 5-7, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1. Not since the 2006 Australian Open—a tournament he'd go on to win 10 times—has Djokovic exited a Slam in the first round. He'd also never lost in the U.S Open’s first round before. But this loss was not without recent precedent. Djokovic had struggled with the heat at the Cincinnati Open in mid-August, losing his first match there to Thiago Agustin Tirante: coincidentally, another 25-year-old Argentine then ranked around No. 50. During that match, Djokovic appeared to vomit and took a medical timeout. After that loss, he referenced an unspecified health condition "that has been bothering me for the past couple of years," making it hard for him to play in hot and humid weather. To the best of my knowledge, that was his first-ever public reference to such a condition.

Two matches into a new Premier League season is the perfect time to overreact. One match is a fluke; three matches feel too real. Two matches, however, give an overeager observer just enough pattern recognition to make claims that far exceed reality. This is doubly true if a club has shown quality and frailty in almost equal part. Therefore, after two barnstorming wins and/or two near-collapses to open the 2026-27 campaign, I feel confident in saying that Chelsea is great, doomed, and a work in progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfN4qZtc5sk Really, how you feel about Chelsea will depend on how you feel about life. For an optimist, the club beating last year's 11th- and 8th-placed teams to start the season, the former away from home and the latter at Stamford Bridge, is a beautiful start to the Xabi Alonso era. On the flip side, Chelsea's inability to see out either game without letting the opponents back into them is a pessimist's fantasy, a red klaxon blaring over Chelsea's lopsided roster construction and a manager who, while highly regarded, is coming off of a high-profile flameout. The boring and most correct feeling is probably somewhere in the middle, of course, but that's no fun. What is fun is Chelsea Football Club as it stands after two matchweeks; similarly to last season's Liverpool, the Blues have declared themselves as the main event for neutrals, a must-watch whirlwind of chaos that might leave Chelsea fans needed heart medication.

Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Houston Texans. Your 2025 record: The Texans won 12 games last year. Their defense stomped around like King Ghidorah ravaging Tokyo. Their offense puttered along like a dump truck with two flat tires and one square one. 

We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with two human children and two cats. He won the league in 2018, so Greg is an unreliable narrator. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Ore. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love and Chan running an alleged scam operation that involved defrauding various women through Love (unconvincingly) pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Prosecutors say Love and Chan stole a total of $1.3 million from several women between 2022 and 2026. Love would meet the women on dating apps, Chan would pose as his financial advisor, and then they would convince the women to send them money to be used in investment strategies. From the DoJ's press release: Love and Chan also exchanged investment-related electronic communications in which Chan pretended to be Love’s investment adviser. Chan sent Love messages purportedly encouraging Love to invest in new opportunities. Love then sent screenshots of those messages to numerous victims to further convince them to send money to either Love or Chan. Chan and Love also hosted three-way FaceTime calls in which they showed victims falsified investment gains and encouraged victims to part with their money. Victims sent Love and Chan money due to their belief that their money would be invested in legitimate investment vehicles on the victims’ behalf. Some victims also loaned Love large amounts of money, if victims did not have cash to invest, Love sometimes instructed them to take out personal loans in both scenarios Love assured the victims that they would quickly be repaid.

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified, but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day, or to the fact that she did all that only to be outsung, and in some quarters, almost entirely eclipsed by Houston’s cover. I know that I saw a variation on that tweet a couple of times before I actually sought out Parton’s original recording. I remember finding it a bit boring. The story goes that “I Will Always Love You” was written as a sort of parting gift to Parton’s mentor Porter Wagoner, who introduced Parton to the world in the ’60s on his long-running nationally syndicated musical variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. The two worked together through the late ’60s and early ’70s before Parton decided to do what she came to Nashville to do: become her own star. In a stripped-down 2009 performance, Parton recounts how Wagoner took the news: “When I started working with Porter, I told him I had come to Nashville to be my own star and to have my own group. But the money was so good, I told Porter I would stay for five years. And he agreed to that. Well, five years came and … I told him I wanted to go out on my own. He was just having a fit about it. We argued a lot and I thought, He’s never going to listen to me. He’s not hearing a word I’m saying … So, I went home, wrote a song about it, came back the next day and I said, ‘Porter, just sit down, let me sing you something, then you’ll know how I feel.’”

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair.  Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relationship to femininity that I found, in turns, inspiring and confounding. Inspiring because she was always in on the joke—“it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”; “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde”—and confounding because I would find myself thinking, Doesn’t she ever get tired of having to be in on the joke? I’ve never had a particularly vexed relationship with my gender, but I do sometimes find the outward trappings tiring. Possibly this is because there are certain parts of it I’m just not very good at. Style has always been a thing that other people are able to have while I—no matter how much effort or money I expend—kind of just wear clothes. Every once in a while I’ll watch makeup tutorials on Instagram and get annoyed ping-ponging between the women showing me how to do a “no-makeup makeup look” who don’t actually need to wear any makeup, and the ones who approach it with the kind of rigor one might more readily associate with big engineering projects. I realized years ago that having very long hair is an easy way to avoid ever having to learn what to do with it, and so when I tip my head back my hair touches my ass.