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Defector is proud to announce the addition of a new guy. Timothy Faust has joined us as our Director of Revenue. You might know Tim as a previous Defector contributor and the author of a legendary blog post, but in this role he will be entirely focused on data, revenue projections, and all sorts of…

When Demi Vollering crossed the line in Nice on Sunday, she didn't just win her second Tour de France Femmes title. She provided a worthy finale for the best edition of the race yet. The fifth running of the Tour was spectacular from start to finish. There were interesting winners throughout the race, an amazing general classification battle that came down to the final climb, and fresh, dramatic storylines almost every day. The Tour achieved a higher density of both intriguing stories and good racing in nine stages than the men's Tour did in 21, in the process raising questions not about the future viability of the race but about how big it can be. Vollering is a totally worthy rider to earn the honor of becoming the race's repeat champion, though a test of the overall quality of a bike race is how much intrigue there is beyond the question of who wins the overall. It's useful, then, to review this one in chronological order.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — In the quarter-century that I’ve been playing and writing about Scrabble—a game in which greatness requires that rare matrix of biological gift, yeoman preparation, preternatural vision, marathon endurance, and blind luck—I’ve never witnessed anything as shocking and painful as the end of the 2026 North American championship here in July. The moment was right up there with any agony-of-defeat ending in any sport: After 3,700 games, thousands of moves, and millions of points scored by more than 200 players, the title was decided by a word that wasn’t a word at all. On one side of the board: No. 1 seed Mack Meller of Lexington, Ky., a 26-year-old onetime child prodigy and current Scrabble grandmaster, content creator, teacher, and puzzle constructor. On the other: No. 5 seed Orry Swift of Winnie, Texas, a 39-year-old accounting professor and five-tool gamer—he’s been a top player in World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering; he’s about halfway through a quest to play and review every Super Nintendo game (about 880 in all); and, under his username Sheex, he recently completed a charity speedrun of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. “Coming off a high like that into making the finals at Scrabble nationals was crazytown,” he told me. Swift entered his first Scrabble tournament in 2004 and has been among the highest-rated players for more than 15 years. Meller began playing competitively at age 10. He became the youngest player to achieve an expert rating, at 11, and cracked the Top 10 at 13. At the Scrabble Players Championship, held over five days in a football field-sized convention-center ballroom here, they topped a field of 51 players in the top North American-lexicon division (out of 242 overall) with identical 20-8 records to qualify for a best-of-five finals and a shot at the $10,000 first prize. (An additional 38 players competed using an international-English word list; it’s complicated.)

The first text that Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve received after the team drafted Olivia Miles this spring was from a prescient Kayla McBride: “I’m going to be wide open.” The stats are bearing that out to an extent; the veteran sharpshooter is putting up some of the most efficient numbers of her career this year, and the Lynx offense is humming. After Minnesota’s 103–90 win over the Dallas Wings on Sunday, McBride told reporters that sharing a backcourt with Miles has made her feel like “a kid in a candy store.” Was she selling herself short? What strikes me about watching McBride this year is not how easy her job is, but how easy she’s made a difficult job look. Without Napheesa Collier around for the first few months of the summer, McBride drew frequent doubles and was left to pick up the extra defensive slack. All season long, she’d quietly kept the Lynx rolling with all her hard work.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TY0wkaYUs

When I asked Morgan Jerkins what she might want to talk about on an episode of Try Hard, she came to me with an idea that was less major life-changing-thunderclap moment and more the culmination of a million smaller decisions that stemmed from one big one: moving to New York City as a young grad and choosing to build a life. The twenty-something who moves to the big city to pursue a career in the arts is a well-worn archetype at this point, and one emulated by many of the very bloggers at this website, myself included. But the allure of the old "three bucks, two bags, one me" storyline endures for a reason. In our interview, Morgan and I talk about the conservative gay roommate who helped her workshop some of her most viral articles, how moving to Harlem helped awaken a new dimension of her blackness, and whether 2015 was the golden age for a writer hustling on the internet. She also offers up some wisdom on the power of staying soft in a city and industry that wants to harden you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3QW2G-lAI

Some people are fans of the Atlanta Falcons. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Atlanta Falcons. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Atlanta Falcons. Your 2025 record: 8-9, which is less of a win-loss record than it is a manifestation of the spirit of mediocrity that inhabits this franchise. It's been almost 10 years since 28-3 happened, and the Falcons have gone a combined 65-84 with one playoff appearance since. This team's never good enough to care about or bad enough to pity, and therefore it is something much worse: a team that might as well not even exist.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it has created an opportunity to reflect on what's happened in the quarter-century since that fateful day, but more importantly, it has created an opportunity to get angry at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for being Muslim. In late July, Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed in the attacks, posted an online petition requesting that the mayor not be allowed to participate in this year's remembrance ceremony. The reasons that Mamdani's presence would be supposedly disrespectful include the following: "Support for, or associations with, individuals whose public statements or records are viewed by concerned family members as dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies." Basically anything could qualify under that criteria, which I suppose is the point. One of Galante's other reasons is that Mamdani once took a photo with Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn imam whom law enforcement put on a list while investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Andrew Cuomo had attacked Mamdani for this during last year's mayoral race, repeating the feds' terminology that Wahhaj was an "unindicted co-conspirator." Another way to phrase that might be "never actually charged with a crime." As mayor, Michael Bloomberg once met with Wahhaj, and yet somehow that didn't disqualify him from attending any 9/11 ceremonies. Besides, Mamdani already attended last year before he was elected.

No one's on the fence about solving our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Faren Roth, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Faren Roth is a PhD student who lives in Lafayette, Ind. as of yesterday with her cat, Mr. Toast. She enjoys playing soccer and softball, was on the [redacted] team in high school, and has recently tricked herself into enjoying running.  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."

The notice from Don Nelson's family announcing his death on Sunday at the age of 86 said he "peacefully went to be with the Lord, surrounded by his loving family.” This immediately convinces us that the deity in question here likes uptempo basketball, beer, blunts, and cards, and who wouldn't want a final judge who leans into those pastimes? Every Nelson obit, including this one, will note that he was the second-winningest coach in NBA history—1,335 wins, not including 75 playoff victories. That is maybe the 17th-most interesting thing about him. He was the iconoclast's iconoclast, devoted not just to winning basketball games but to finding ways to win them in the manner of his choosing. The manner he chose favored teams that were improbably fast and impossibly small, and he used it to take bad teams and swiftly make them infuriatingly good. He irked his bosses and enraged his superiors everywhere he went; he befriended players and took money from sportswriters unwise enough to sit at his poker table. He took three different teams to the playoffs as seventh or eighth seeds and won the first-round series, still the only coach to do so, and he also coached a team to 48 wins and missed the playoffs. He was in short the single liveliest underdog in the field wherever that field happened to be. He is almost certainly the only coach to have a distinct playing style named for him—Nellie Ball, by far the least creative thing about it—probably because nobody else had dared to try it. They do now, though. Big men at the arc, three- and four-guard sets, treating the shot clock like a stopwatch that should never expire—Nelson was into all that decades ago, and while he might have been an old fud compared to some of today's hoops accelerationists, none of those teams would have even dared be who they are now if he hadn't done it back in the long ago.

ESPN reporter Lindsey Thiry found herself accosted by an alarmingly big bug at Los Angeles Rams camp Thursday. She was preparing for a live report when the flying creature suddenly dive-bombed in. The bug hovered around Thiry for several seconds until the NFL reporter gave it a good and audible thwack with her mic. ESPN broadcaster Molly McGrath later interviewed Thiry about the identity of the bug. "What is that, a wasp? What was that, Lindsey?" McGrath asked. "It was the biggest bug I've ever seen," Thiry answered, having recovered from the ordeal.