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ATLANTA — Five games into the Finals, it felt odd that we’d yet to watch the game where one team makes everything. The Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries do both take great pride in their defenses, and their offenses do each have certain limitations. Golden State’s heavy diet of threes, for instance, leaves them prone to variance. But that means, you know, that the shooting numbers should vary—not be resolutely bad for two weeks. After Game 2, when the sludge of Game 1 appeared to carry over and the Dream tied the series, a reporter asked Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase why she thought it had been such a struggle for these teams to score. Nakase didn’t take the question too seriously. “What’s our identity?” she said, panning the room, the impatient teacher in front of her class. “What? You guys should know this.” Two of the league’s top defenses, sure. Even so, the numbers were really bad. The reporter pressed Nakase again.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. In case you missed it a week ago, The Athletic published this extremely detailed report from Jourdan Rodrigue and Mike Sando on how NFL game-day communications work. I encourage you to read the entire thing in full, because it includes a lot of sweet tea, including stories about head coaches angrily firing their assistants over the headset (then changing their minds the next day) and, dearer to my heart, one assistant coach staying on the channel while he had to take a frantic piss. My kindred spirit. As with all things NFL, these communication systems are coordinated with near-military fuss. The graphic design in the story includes multiple ornate diagrams that outline how all of this shit works. We see how dozens of coaches on the sideline are talking with one another, on the field and up in the booth, during a game. We also see all of the tech crew workers behind the bench, wearing different-colored hats to signify which of them are in charge of keeping the radio channels private, which ones service the Microsoft tablets that players love to angrily smash on the ground, and such and such. All of these people are connected by a series of invisible lines so tangled, it looks like an old-timey phone switchboard when laid out on paper.

My favorite moment from this year's World Gymnastics Championships was the second after Skye Blakely hit the final pose in her floor routine. For a second, she was all smiles, sass, and confidence, radiating exactly the energy her sport's judges want to see. Then the music ended, Blakely's muscles released, and the 21-year-old from Texas looked like she might cry. The performance was done and Blakely could once again be exactly who she was: a young woman who had just done something very difficult. That routine capped Blakely's first all-around gold medal, which was one of four medals Blakely brought home this week from the Netherlands—her gold joined a Team USA silver, as well as individual bronzes for herself on uneven bars and vault. A pair of Americans—Claire Pease and Reese Esponda—took individual gold and silver on the floor, respectively, in Rotterdam, while Pease also won silver on vault. On the men's side, Fred Richard won gold on the men's floor, making him the country's first gold medalist on that exercise since Paul Hamm in 2003. In other words, even if Simone Biles doesn't come back for the 2028 Olympic Games, women's gymnastics seems to be in good shape. In fact, Blakely's win meant the United States went a whopping one year without being home to the reigning women's all-around champion, as Biles had previously won the title in 2023 (at Worlds) and 2024 (the Paris Olympics). Even that requires an asterisk because at last year's Worlds, American Leanne Wong took home the all-around silver.

The Tampa Bay Rays have been dogged in their pursuit of excellence without extravagance, a process that is now two decades along and which has been hugely successful, provided your wall calendar is missing the months of October and November. They have mastered the technique of buying low, selling at an advantageous price, then rebuilding by buying low again so fully that they have convinced many of the league's other owners that theirs is the one true path. They have beaten baseball's mythical salary cap by staying below whatever it would be through simple discipline—as in, refusal to pay market-rate big-league salaries—and industry-leading player development. Good for them; they win a lot of ballgames most summers, and the owners meeting every winter. The ring for that must be enormous. But the Rays received a harsh education in this World Series, and not merely by being eradicated in five games by the Milwaukee Brewers. Other than the 12th inning of Game 4, the Rays left no footprint on the series; in every inning played before midnight in the Eastern Time Zone, they were the inferior team. They were overwhelmed by the Brewers' superior bullpen, the off-brand heroism of Cooper Pratt and Sal Frelick, and the more predictable heroism of William Contreras and Jackson Chourio. The difference between the best team in baseball and the best team in the American League was exactly as advertised. That's not the problem the Rays face today, though. There is little shame in losing as they did, because the Brewers were the better team when the series began as well as when it ended. Someone finishes second every year. We know this. We checked.

I remember the pit in my stomach as I woke up to the texts telling me that Mahmoud Khalil had been kidnapped. I remember the terrifying 48 hours when we had no idea where he had been taken—just that the President wanted to make an example out of him. I remember crying on the phone to my dad, telling him I had lost all hope. It was difficult to relive, and in preparing for this interview, I wanted to do Mahmoud justice. Mahmoud was central to the community of activists at Columbia University. He was the person we looked to for calm and guidance in the midst of upheaval. When he was taken, we all felt his absence. We were mostly kids. We struggled not just with the question of how to push back against the intensity of encroaching fascism and the weight of the federal government's crackdown on free speech, but how to do so without Mahmoud. He knew the university rulebook front and back. He knew all of the administrators and had a friendly rapport with them (or so we thought). He would calm us down when it felt like everything was falling apart. All of a sudden, he was thousands of miles away at a detention center known for inadequate medical care, unsafe food and living conditions, and abusive tactics by guards. And we remained inside the gates of the place that had allowed it to happen, as the retired Homeland Security Secretary, former IDF intelligence officer, and war profiteers who made up the administration and board of trustees wrung their hands and told us they were powerless.  Mahmoud’s book No Land to Stand On is a devastating and essential story of his time in ICE detention, his childhood in Syria, and his experience as a negotiator at Columbia. In typical Mahmoud fashion, he insists that there are people far braver than him, who have made more sacrifices than him. He wants you to know the stories of the men he was detained with. They too were separated from their families and held without any charge.

The past few months, I have experienced multiple male cab drivers trying to get my phone number to take me out on a date. One even stopped his car a few blocks away from my apartment. I have also had men yell "Nice tits" and make obscene gestures at me while driving away. I got a boob job a few years ago, so you could say I was asking for it, but the sheer volume of men who corner me in public would suggest that it’s more than an isolated incident. This kind of harassment is ubiquitous.  Still, I love men. I would like them to do better because I do often enjoy their company. I know I have previously panned many books on reforming the coarser sex—you could say we are living in a crisis of bad books about the masculinity crisis. Thankfully, Jon Ronson's The Castle is a thoughtful, empathetic work of narrative journalism. His prose is rigorous. No adverb or adjective is wasted.  Ronson is a sort of literary Louis Theroux, interested in the ideas and people at the fringes of society. He's explored a number of conspiracy theories, hosted multiple podcasts and radio shows, and wrote a book on cancellation and stigma called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. In The Castle, he follows two primary narrative strands: a man who is trying to lure women to his fortress in rural Connecticut, and a man who was shamed online for making video content that involved his kids. Through these stories, he wonders what a more positive version of masculinity could look like for future generations. He is neither proscriptive nor apolitical when considering the lonely destructive capacity of men without an outlet. 

It is difficult to encapsulate the Milwaukee Brewers' first World Series victory, because for all the limiters and qualifiers that suggest they had done the implausible—the payroll, and the market size, and facing the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the "first World Series victory" of it all—they had, in all reality, done the very probable. The Brewers had the best regular-season record in Major League Baseball, with 103 wins. By many metrics, they had the best starting pitcher in baseball, with Jacob Misiorowski. They were rested coming into the World Series, and though no one could know this until the first game in Tampa, they were playing with a seven-game home-field advantage. They swept the Dodgers and then won the World Series in five; for good measure, they also nearly won the one game they lost. It is insulting to the broader picture that the Brewers failed to sweep. No team down 0-3 in the World Series has ever forced a Game 6. If the Tampa Bay Rays ever got close, it was in the manner of one of Zeno's paradoxes: closing in by halves to the possibility of making it an interesting series, and never getting there. However, it would be incorrect to state that the Brewers had only done the very probable, because in an MLB postseason, achieving the very probable is very, very difficult. Even the best bullpen in baseball, never mind the third-best, will experience bad days. Hits dry up. Everyone makes an untimely error one time or another. Winning in baseball is one thing, but making it look totally controlled is hard work. Just ask the Los Angeles Dodgers, world-beaters for a decade or so, who failed to beat the world more times than not. On the most recent occasion they did, it required the intervention of several magicians, or at least Miguel Rojas and Andy Pages.

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 how to handle the emotionally volatile school drop-off process.

Three short weeks after he appeared to be on the cusp of assuming the presidency of Brazil and turbocharging the fascist revival movement started by his cadaverous father Jair, Flavio Bolsonaro is now a fugitive from the Brazilian justice system. Having been humiliated by an octogenarian in Brazil's presidential election, he was unable to gin up any support for an election theft, and was thus forced to choose between handing over his passport or scampering off to Miami like so many failed dictators before him. Bolsonaro will no longer get to see through his family's dream of evangelicizing Brazil and turning the full force of its military inward. Instead he will be browsing the aisles of Publix and begging a different, much stupider octogenarian for the scraps of his dwindling mercy. How did the younger Bolsonaro get here? His journey to Florida began with the collapse of the powerful bank, Banco Master, just over a year ago. That collapse resulted in the world learning about all the corrupt schemes the bank was doing, and also how intertwined it was with the Bolsonaro family. Incredibly, Flavio hitting up the now-jailed Banco Master owner for money to finance a Jim Caviezel–led biopic of his tubercular father is at the center of his corruption case. Flavio's best and perhaps only chance of avoiding jail time hinged on his family's ability to win Brazil's 2026 presidential election.

As the nation marked its 250th anniversary this summer, Donald Trump could not stop posting AI-generated images of himself alongside George Washington. In one, Trump and Washington ride horses through a bucolic landscape, the sun setting in the distance. In another, Trump saves Washington from falling off a cliff; this one is styled as a movie poster for a time-traveling buddy-cop film. These are in addition to the very real images of Washington’s and Trump’s faces hanging side by side on massive banners outside the Department of Interior building. More than any others, though, Trump posted images of him and George Washington in the proposed White House ballroom. There's one in which Trump holds rolled up architectural plans (in an already-completed ballroom) while pointing out some distant feature to George. In another, they both stand in the ballroom, staring directly at the camera; even from the front, you can tell they’ve both adopted Trump’s signature ass-out posture. There are at least five different versions of this particular scene. Trump’s insistence on posting images of himself alongside George Washington offers the perfect distillation of how he thinks about history. For him, history is synonymous with celebrity—and there could be no higher honor for our historical VIPs to be feted in Trump’s glimmering new ballroom. Unwilling, for obvious reasons, to wait for history’s judgment, Trump uses AI to place himself alongside the past’s most famous figures.