NowLoop

Let me cut right to it: Why can’t I get curry fries over here? Look, I just got back from a work trip to Dublin (where everybody says "Look" to start a sentence), and curry fries are weighing heavy. The trip went as swell as possible. I not only got to cover an all-timer of a football match, but also had my fill of curry chips, in the local parlance, just as I'd hoped and dreamed. Good god, they’re good. And they’re everywhere in the Irish capital. But upon returning, I got peeved by the lack of curry fries in my own country. How can something so ubiquitous and cheap and delicious over there be impossible to find stateside? We love fries: A 2025 study found the average American eats 17 pounds of 'em a year. Researchers found lots of love for curly fries; curry fries got nothing. I’m not aware of any place in Washington, D.C., where I live, that sells curry fries. Yeah, OK, my editor may have located a pub that is 1.5 miles from house and serves curry fries shortly after I filed this, but what I truly desire is ubiquity. A huge part of the pleasure of my curry fry experience in Dublin was derived from knowing that the scrumptious snack was never far out of reach. Pubs, chip shops, food trucks—they were everywhere and all had what I wanted.

Some people are fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Tampa Bay Buccaneers. https://bsky.app/profile/profootballtalk.bsky.social/post/3mrurzuufhk2u

Professional tennis has a way of breeding misery. It begins with the dream of reaching the No. 1 ranking, but almost everybody falls short. Those who find the promised land feel puzzlingly empty once there. Familial and coaching roles blur. Prodigious children bear the responsibility of feeding and enriching their families. The mechanism through which matches are decided is a torturous maze disguised as a scoring system. Tune in and you may see grown adults reaming out their support staff, family, the chair umpire, and themselves; tearful breakdowns mid-match; balls whacked out of the stadium, into the stands, or occasionally into a tournament employee's vital organ; rackets thrashed and mangled on the court. It's that last image which resides on the cover of Matthew Futterman's new book The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis. With decades of covering professional sports behind him, Futterman wondered why tennis seemed uniquely taxing. It's a question with which he leads off the book: "Why does this game seemingly drive everyone mad?" By the end of its 329 pages, it seems generous to even call high-level tennis a game. Most games are fun. The current generation of top players and their families approach it more like life and death.  As the tennis press dwindles and players withdraw behind agents and personal YouTube channels, Futterman has pulled off a coup of access. He's able to ask the top players about their hunts—and the price of their lifelong chase. It can be a bleak scene. Zheng Qinwen tells Futterman about her father taking her on a long car ride, under the guise of her doing a tryout with a new coach, and leaving her behind. The coach had already agreed to take her on; Zheng was seven years old. Tommy Paul recalls seeing parents beat up their children after losses in juniors. Those without generational talent are miserable, forever pursuing the standard of the blessed. The chosen ones often find that standard but also spend a lot of their time being miserable. Oh, and having dedicated their lives to this sport, nobody knows who they are in its absence.

Reading: What is it? Why does anyone do it? Can anyone at Axios do it? No. Maybe that is why they write like that. When you read a book, the stuff in the book goes into your mind, and your mind assembles all of the stuff into imagery and thoughts and feelings, and alchemizes meaning from it. A person reasonably could consider this "what's good about reading," or "the point of reading," or "buddy that's actually just ... what reading is," but that all assumes that your reason for reading anything is that you want to learn something from it, even if it's only at the level of, like, what ultimately happens to the Whos down in Whoville. Before today, I had taken for granted that this, the desire to put into one's head something that wasn't already in there, was the only reason anyone would want to read anything, ever. Even the reading people do in furtherance of the most dismal goals—even when somebody reads some miserable how-to-get-ahead-in-business book, or a sociopathic pickup-artist manual—they do because they hope to extract from the text something useful, which will reside in their brain long enough to be exploited. The compulsory reading students do for school, likewise: They hope to retain enough of this dry 19th-century novel about variability in the relative politeness of indistinguishable British persons to score a decent grade on the upcoming test. In all cases, the goal is best understood as putting something into your mind that wasn't there before.

My name is Noelle, and I'm a fan of the world's largest operating steam locomotive. I used to think this was a unique fact about me. But recently our tiny fandom has exploded. Big Boy, as he’s called—Christian name: Union Pacific No. 4014—retired in 1961 when diesel-electric engines made cumbersome steam trains unnecessary. In recent years, he has emerged from hibernation for heritage tours out west, so his fans can see his 1.2 million-pound body and human-sized wheels up close. And this year, Union Pacific announced something unprecedented: Big Boy would travel off his home turf, cross-country, all the way to the East Coast and back.  Officially, this was in honor of America’s 250th birthday; unofficially, people surmised this had something to do with Union Pacific’s intended merger with Norfolk Southern, which owns track in the East. But train enthusiasts—who prefer “railfans” and definitely do not prefer “foamers”—didn’t care why Big Boy was coming. All that mattered was when and where. Every day they flooded Facebook with dozens of fresh, breathless sightings—there he was in Argos, Ind.; Payne, Ohio; Portageville, N.Y.—and every day another tiny, desperate Rust Belt chamber of commerce announced its local Big Boy celebration with an AI slop flyer.  Everywhere Big Boy chugged, people screamed, waved, sometimes cried or took wedding photos or, in one case, tried to climb him and fell and went to the hospital for a spine fracture. On July 2, a police department in Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg Township declared the Big Boy watch event a “mass casualty incident” after the heat sent 35 people to the hospital.

Some people are fans of the Baltimore Ravens. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Baltimore Ravens. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: Baltimore Ravens. Your 2025 record: 8-9, with all that implies.

On Monday, Donald Trump doubled down on his weird and eugenic obsession with autism by signing an executive order calling to split up the MMR vaccine for children into three separate shots given in three separate appointments. "I wanna find what's going on with autism," Trump said in a press conference held upon signing the executive order, in case his intentions were not totally clear. He then proceeded to estimate the volumes of vaccines with an inscrutable measuring system, referring to "vats of vaccines," a "big shot like a large glass of something" and "a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda," as well as syringes containing "what seemingly looks like gallons." Although it feels increasingly pointless and embarrassing to refute the rantings of a man who increasingly looks and speaks like a Furby, it is still valuable to do so. The MMR vaccine—a combination shot that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella—is perfectly safe. It is also convenient, as it means parents do not need to schedule three separate doctor visits to fully vaccinate their kids. And though the conversation rate between a gallon, a vat, and a large glass of something remains unclear, none of these measurements apply to the MMR vaccine, which is typically 0.5 milliliters, or a tenth of a teaspoon. (What is this, a vat for ants?) There is another combination shot, the MMRV, which adds a vaccine for varicella (chickenpox) to the mix and comes with a slightly increased risk of a fever-associated seizure if given to a child younger than 4. But, as Anil Oza explains for STAT, there is little evidence suggesting that further breaking up the MMR vaccine would offer any benefit to a child's health or safety. What three vaccines does offer is inconvenience for parents and doctors, higher cost, and more physical injections for the kids. Separating shots also increases the chance that a child will get infected by a vaccine-preventable disease before they return to the doctor. Vaccine manufacturers in the U.S. do not even make single-shot versions of the MMR shot, and manufacturing single-dose vaccines would take years of research and testing.

In the hypothetical situation in which a fan is attending a baseball game in person and has to wait for a video review to be completed, what is the length of time the review can last before she might turn murderous? Five minutes? Ten? The umpires in Monday night's game between the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays put this to the test with a 15-minute review of a baserunning debacle by the Red Sox that ended with the visiting team being awarded a run in the end. But let's start from the beginning. In the top of the seventh inning, with two on and no one out, Red Sox shortstop Nick Sogard smoked a 104.9-mph low liner that bounced before entering the glove of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at first base. Guerrero threw to second for the force out; Red Sox catcher Connor Wong, who'd reached first on a single before Sogard came up to hit, was unhappily stranded between first and second, unclear on whether Guerrero had snagged the ball out of the air (he had not). The play resulted in only one out; Sogard reached first, and the Red Sox had runners on the corners with one out as Ceddanne Rafaela came up to bat. On the first pitch of the at-bat, Rafaela flicked a ball into semi-deep center field. This is when things began to go very wrong. The Boston baserunners, under the mistaken impression that there were two outs—perhaps because the Toronto stadium scoreboard mistakenly said so—ran on contact. Blue Jays center fielder Brett Bateman easily caught the ball and threw to second as the Red Sox runner on third jogged across home plate. While the Blue Jays pitcher and catcher headed off the field, evidently also under the mistaken impression that there had been two outs, the infield sprung into action, throwing the ball to first for the third out. Toronto appealed the play, which is a form of making an out that is not to be confused with an instant replay review; in situations like a runner failing to tag, the umpire does not make the call at their own discretion and instead requires the defensive team to explicitly appeal when relevant. And then they ran off the field.

SAN FRANCISCO — Charli XCX had a cold. You could only tell after five songs and one costume change, when the backup dancers and full backing band briefly disappeared so she could perform "Track 10," the furthest she reached into her back catalogue. Alone, she sounded a little shredded, and would occasionally let the backing track sing for her. Probably this would sink other would-be headliners, or at least meaningfully affect the performance, but no, whatever mild illness Charli was contending with gave her a slightly plaintive warble, one that was coherent with the show and further shaded its grand thematic ambitions. Her headlining set this past Friday night at the Outside Lands festival, coming weeks after the release of Music, Fashion, Film, was so much more than pressing play on the new stuff and the old stuff and pleasing her massive new fanbase. It was a monument to art, mortality, and fame, and the ways those three do and do not square the contradictions of each other. Two years after the final sunset of Brat Summer, Charli finds herself in one of the trickiest and least forgiving positions any pop star could occupy. Brat was a world-destroying phenomenon, a meteor that struck at exactly the right moment to launch Charli out of pop's impossible middle class and into the rarified stratosphere of mainstream fame: seven movie credits, a sold-out arena tour, none other than the Democratic National Convention prostrating itself before her green glow. Charli achieved escape velocity because Brat was both sonically and lyrically an immediate, defiant album, an album about continuing to party and have fun and try stuff after turning 30, set to A. G. Cook's best work synthesizing a decade of the bloghouse era for the generation that arrived 15 years too late for MSTRKRFT.

The band American Football released their fourth self-titled LP in May. They are no longer the band they were in the late '90s, when their debut EP and album somehow developed a cult status that has endured to this day. Today, they are a middle-aged band making a much more adult imagining of emo music. LP4 is soft, wistful, jazzy indie-rock music with singer Mike Kinsella's deep and tender vibrato working on an ASMR level as well as a lyrical one. It's one of the best releases of the year, specifically because it is largely incongruous with any other music being made. It is patient, smooth, and mature, a true, properly sequenced album that is more than the sum of its parts. It is not necessarily a record out of time, as much as its beyond timeliness. It is lost in its world and asks you to get lost with it, which is one of the defining qualities of all of American Football's music. If you were to ask an American Football fan what makes that first album from 1999 so magical, they'd likely struggle to put it into words. I don't think even the band could explain it to you. It's a credit to them that they've never really tried to replicate it. In Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review of the record, he writes about the band's, and that particular album's, special appeal: Very little of American Football is in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined.