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When news came out that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had taken a majority stake in Electronic Arts last September, it was clear to anyone familiar with Saudi Arabia, EA, private equity, or capitalism that the move would make an already terrible gaming company even worse. I wrote as much at the time, and though the sale took until August of this year to go through, I can grimly say that I was completely right: On Wednesday, Bloomberg video game reporter Jason Schreier reported that EA had shut down BioWare, the game studio behind such classic role-playing game series as Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age. https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3myfmzacrps2x The studio then confirmed the news in a statement.

Tennessee Titans defensive tackle Jordan Elliott was a surprise inactive for Sunday's game, not traveling with the team. Head coach Robert Saleh told reporters only that Elliott was "dealing with personal stuff." On Tuesday, the Titans released Elliott, along with a cryptic statement referencing an "incident." One never wants to have an incident, but the lack of detail only made the whole thing more mysterious. Later that day, we finally got enough detail to say, Oh yeah, that'll do it. As first reported by Austin Stanley and Easton Freeze of AtoZSports.com and Aaron Wilson of KPRC, last week Elliott got into a practice beef with a teammate and left to go get his gun. Elliott and offensive tackle JC Latham got into a fight during drills at the Titans' facility, the reports say, and Elliott was told by coaches to leave the field. He left the building, going out to the players' parking lot with the intention of retrieving a gun from his car. Defensive lineman John Franklin-Myers, a real hero here, was able to talk Elliott out of getting the gun, and he never brought it back into the building.

On the night of May 10, 1968, the most storied night in the last century of French of civil unrest, nearly 40,000 students faced off against policemen in the Latin Quarter of Paris—one of the largest crowds the city's swelling protest movement had yet assembled. Famously, cobblestones were torn up from the streets to erect barricades. By the time morning broke, hundreds of demonstrators had been beaten bloody or arrested anyway. That same evening, the Cannes Film Festival opened with a ceremony hosted by retired actress Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and a screening of a restored edition of Gone With the Wind. That juxtaposition quickly led to calls for the festival’s suspension. On May 18, after a week of resistance from Cannes’s organizers, a group of filmmakers and guests led by the directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard held a press conference demanding a closure. “There isn’t one film showing the problems going on today among workers and students⁠—not one, whether by Forman, myself, Polanski, or Francois,” Godard said. “There are none. We’re behind the times. Our student comrades set an example by getting their heads bashed in last week.”  There were grumbles in the crowd at this, and Godard’s patience snapped. “We’re talking solidarity with students and workers, and you’re talking dolly shots and close-ups!” he yelled. “You’re assholes!”

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, Ray answers a question on how to deal with your child's tantrums over trying new activities.

On this week's episode of Nothing But Respect, the discerning listener can hear me and Harry, both of whom are recovering from minor illnesses, losing our voices over the course of an hour and a half. We had a lot to talk about, including the fact that we finally played basketball together, the ongoing WNBA Finals, Michael Porter Jr.'s podcasting habits, and, finally, the main event: a recap of the 2025-26 NBA season, from its inception through to the start of this current season. The logic here is that so much stuff happens in an NBA season that the best way to preview an upcoming season isn't to make predictions, but to lay out the historical record. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

When I was on the fence about buying a Nintendo Switch 2, I held off with the self-aware knowledge that I would eventually cave come September. I knew that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave would break me. I needed to play this game like my life depended on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmF38S_0vPs A month (and a few days) after release, I have 70-plus hours played on Fortune's Weave, and I wish it were double the amount. Still, though, 70 hours is a huge amount; aside from World of Warcraft, I simply don't spend 70 hours on a single video game anymore. (The last "long" game I played was another strategy role-playing game, but even the Final Fantasy Tactics remake only took me 36 hours to complete.) Fire Emblem is different, though. More than perhaps any video game series I have devoted chunks of my life to, Fire Emblem finds its way into both my waking thoughts and my sleeping nightmares. I began to see spreadsheets in the dark, thinking about ways to best build my virtual army of adorable murderers. I sought out the magic lightning Levin Swords in my deepest fantasies; words like "troubadour" and maybe-not-words like "bardinger" took on new meaning. I became obsessed, as fellow Defectorite Kathryn could prove by producing even a portion of the many messages I have sent her about this game in just over a month.

In case you didn’t read about it, or you didn’t hear the hints firsthand, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are reportedly getting divorced. The Monday Night Football broadcast team is the longest-tenured booth duo in NFL history, even moving together from Fox to ESPN as a package deal four years ago. But Buck re-upped with the four-letter for a mint earlier this year, while Aikman, whose contract expires at the end of this season, was left to dangle. This perhaps represented the first time in history that Aikman did not say, “I completely agree with you, Joe,” to his longtime colleague. In fact, the men reportedly almost came to blows over Buck’s supposed betrayal. JUICY! Believe those reports if you like (I do), but either way, Aikman has already openly talked about his “next landing spot,” which means there’s gonna be a big fat vacancy in the MNF booth for ESPN to fill come this spring. What does that have to do with the Rams being the biggest disappointment in football? THAT, dear friends, is one of the Big Questions that Arif Hasan and I tackle on this week’s episode of All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/4484213c-a363-48a6-8228-1a6454eaa898

A media company launching a series of paywalled newsletters is not, on its own and on its face, a strange thing to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of online search is ravaging website traffic, and programmatic advertising doesn’t provide the kind of revenue it used to. If you were running a website like The Ringer, you might decide that it makes financial sense to put writing from some of your most popular staffers behind a paywall. That's exactly what has happened: Sean Fennessey, Zach Lowe, Tom Pelissero, and Bryan Curtis have all recently launched newsletters, only one of which (Curtis’s) is free. This seemingly normal business decision comes with a quirk, though, which is that the newsletters are being published on Substack. Nobody at The Ringer, or Substack, will tell you why. This odd arrangement naturally raises a few questions: Why not just publish these writers’ work on The Ringer’s existing website? Does Spotify, which has owned The Ringer since 2020, somehow not have the technical capability to build its own paywall? If all of this valuable writing is going to live on an entirely different platform, what does that mean for the future of The Ringer’s editorial operation? Have the executives in charge of The Ringer, like seemingly everyone else, surrendered to the idea that Substack is the only place where people will actually read things anymore? I emailed a few questions along these lines to Fennessey, a founder and executive at The Ringer, and more general questions to Lowe, Curtis, and Pelissero. None of them replied. I also reached out to Substack and Spotify, figuring that if the two companies had agreed on some sort of arrangement to produce these newsletters, their respective comms departments would be eager to trumpet their synergistic disruption of the publishing space. Neither company replied. It took reaching out to Ringer editor-in-chief Ben Glicksman to receive something resembling an official response. That came from Mallory Morehead Pritzl, part of the PR team for Spotify: "Thanks for reaching out. We are not commenting at this time."

It's unlikely that you spend much time thinking about the New Orleans Pelicans. However, as a New Orleans resident for whom ball is life, I am rather fixated on them. This team is far stranger than you may have previously understood. They suck in a singular way, and I’ve convinced myself to love them for it. No one else is doing it quite like this. Any attention that was paid to the Pelicans by the broader NBA community last season was a result of one of the strangest trades in NBA history. This, you probably are familiar with: During the 2025 NBA draft, freshly installed Pelicans executives Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver traded an unprotected 2026 first-round pick in order to move up 10 slots and take Derik Queen at No. 13. The Pels could have picked Queen at No. 7, which would have aligned with the organization’s internal valuation of him, but instead they decided to give up an extremely valuable future pick for a smiley, versatile big man who absolutely cannot play defense. The pick they gave up almost became a top-three selection for the Indiana Pacers in a consensus three-player draft in 2026, but thanks to some ping-pong balls, it instead became the eighth pick and remained with the Atlanta Hawks. So who’s laughing now?  The Weaver-Dumars partnership is a particularly thrilling thread of this team’s current construction. Dumars—who last held an operations job for an NBA franchise in 2020, when he performed several jobs for the Sacramento Kings—worked at the NBA’s league office in Secaucus until the Pelicans hired him in 2025. In Detroit, where he last held a GM role, he flamed out spectacularly. Weaver also previously held the GM job in Detroit, and while he and Dumars never worked together, they arrived together in New Orleans as a kind of package deal. As GM of the Pistons from 2020-24, Weaver built rosters that compiled a 74-244 record. On his Hollinger & Duncan podcast, John Hollinger has called Weaver a “subcontractor” in the Pels' GM job, effectively just being the right arm of Dumars.

The Cleveland Guardians will not win the World Series this autumn, just as they have not in any of the last 78 autumns. They were eliminated Monday night by the Tampa Bay Rays: outslugged, out-small-balled, and outlasted. Thus ends what was, by regular-season record, an uneven and dreary but still somehow typical year for the Guardians, who have won between 46 percent and 63 percent of their games every season for 14 years running. In terms of proximity to a championship, this was the most successful Guardians season since 2016, when they made the World Series and fell in seven games to the Chicago Cubs. "We won another division," said a gloomy Austin Hedges after his Guardians were eliminated Monday night. "That's really cool. We won a playoff series. That's really cool." Hedges was hurting, and his point was that the objective coolness of these accomplishments would eventually penetrate his disappointment and give him a sense of satisfaction. Unfortunately for Hedges, almost nothing about the Guardians can be honestly described as "cool." In the realm of aesthetics and vibes, let me say this much: I am glad I do not have to watch any more Guardians games between now and next summer. It's not that I bear them any specific ill will: Unlike at least one of my Defector colleagues, I am not pursuing an active personal vendetta against Steven Kwan. But as the Rays ascended in this ALCS—and as a consequence of the particular way that they ascended, by being better than the Guardians both where the Guardians are weak (hitting the ball hard, hitting the ball in the air) and where the Guardians are strong (posting crooked numbers without ever making solid contact)—they began to exude what I think of as the good kind of inevitability. Tampa Bay's guys were cool and cocky, they seemed downright saturated with juice, and at regular intervals they did bitchin' things. They seemed dialed to the moment, which is to say like a team that belonged in the World Series.