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Some people are fans of the Cleveland Browns. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cleveland Browns. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Cleveland Browns. https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mqpa4rnsfs2h

UEFA, Europe's soccer confederation, confirmed on Thursday that it was not making empty threats over FIFA president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell the World Cup off to private investors. In a statement titled "Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 national associations" posted on the confederation's website, UEFA laid down the gauntlet, using its immense power and money to, it hopes, block Infantino's latest greedy, stupid idea. The key part of the statement reads as follows: Europe’s position is clear. We will never lend this model our legitimacy. No one has the moral authority to sell what they merely hold in trust for the next generation. As a result of today’s discussion, no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership. Nobody should be in any doubt: UEFA and its national associations will oppose these plans with absolute determination.

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove—some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador budgeted $2 million for the job, which was taken up by a local engineering firm and is expected to be completed in October. As workers cut open the vats, viscous brown fish goo shot out onto the factory floor. It will be mixed with peat moss, hauled out in about 200 truckloads, and thrown in a landfill lined with polyethylene, after which it will be sealed up "like a Ziploc," according to the lead engineer on the project. St. Mary's Mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up while describing new hope. "To be known as the 'sauce plant mayor' … it's time for that to be over," he said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn8KEpRqD1Y

Major League Baseball's upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don't. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a third of the league's teams keep forgetting to try, so on—is both true enough and primarily noise made for the sake of making noise. Every CBA negotiation is at least a little bit like this. The question of “which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against JH Blair here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course. It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company, Energy Transfer, owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants’ owner, Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of JH Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. We are just over the halfway point of the year, and after a robust first quarter, the first half of 2026 has turned out to be a fascinating year of music, even when it isn't always successful. Some of our biggest artists have released their most curious music yet, sometimes in good ways even! A collection of burgeoning stars have made great strides toward realizing their potential. If there is one takeaway of this year so far, it's that there is no grand takeaway. No one can decide if music should be bubblier or uglier, hopeful or cynical. The algorithms shape what we hear, while at the same time artists are rebelling against the machine's influence. There is, however, so much yearning. Rap is in an interesting place, and so is every genre in what's left of the husk of the entire music industry. Fellas, I'm no longer scared to say it: music is good. The Best Rap Album Of The Year (So Far)

Everyone believes their generation is uniquely maligned; invariably, so do I. The formative years of my generation—I’m at the older end of the dreaded Gen Z—vanished within the global despair and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. In lieu of the presence of other human beings, many of us retreated into our phone screens and never left. The pandemic irreparably altered our sense of the future. Many are concerned about the blankness in our eyes. We don't touch grass; instead, we bed rot. We have taken refuge in therapy speak, are increasingly skeptical of monogamy and our parents' relationships, and are incredibly, remarkably lonely. The New Yorker buzzily asked in 2025: “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” From Vice, another headline: “Gen Z Isn't Having Sex. They're Doing This Instead.” The “this” we are doing is having “a solid night of sleep.” We may be sleeping—just not with each other. Enter the 62-year-old director Gregg Araki, who is back with a message for my generation after a 12-year absence from feature filmmaking. His latest movie I Want Your Sex is raucous, jubilant, and unafraid to name the very “chickenshit”—the film's words, not mine—quirks of today’s young people. Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is 23 and clueless about his direction in life. On his hands read tattoos that say “Yes?” and “No?” Accordingly, everything the young Elliot does is punctuated with a question mark. Experiences in the world present themselves as either “cool” or “embarrassing” to him. He begins working for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist whose challenging work is drawn from her own sex life. Erika is indisputably “cool” in Elliot’s estimation—after all, didn’t she have sex with Vincent Gallo at the night of The Brown Bunny premiere? Most of all, we sense that Erika has everything Elliot lacks: drive, identity, a career, a healthy libido. Araki's films are landscapes of sex and destruction scored to Slowdive, the Cocteau Twins, and other artists who embody the angst of his young characters. Passion, intensity, and alienation are the fundamental feelings of Araki's films, many of which—notably, his Teen Apocalypse trilogy—are about the frictions young people encounter against the injustices of their heteronormative, capitalist milieu. Sex, violence, fantasy, and lawlessness happen to be the few tools a young person has in their arsenal to feel seen in their Totally F***ed Up world. Still, Araki's work has a tender lining, even under all the bloodshed and existential melancholia. His characters, despairing and angry at the normalized cruelty of their world, search for others who feel as miserable and unseen as they do. Love happens in every way possible in his films: unrequited yearning, group sex, fantasies of alien abduction. The young people of his films just want to find someone to be with as the world ends.

On Tuesday night, a small group of weirdos held an anti-trans rally outside of the Seattle Storm's home arena. The occasion for their gathering was a game against the Indiana Fever and bench player Sophie Cunningham, who had recently participated in an ESPN profile where she said she wants to "protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men." The rally seems like it was a dud, but the organizers got more of the attention they were after inside the arena. Sitting courtside during the game were two teen girls holding signs that read "Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls," and "We love you Sophie." They were both wearing shirts from an apparel brand that donates money to anti-trans organizations. After the game, the two girls made a video with anti-trans agitator Brandi Kruse, in which they claimed they were told off in the arena by Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton. They said that Keaton told them they were "fucking insane." The Storm reacted to this accusation first by apologizing for Keaton's actions, and then the WNBA fined and banned her from the team's next five home games. The team's statement read:

Imagine how good it would feel to pluck the regulation-size basketball off the top of the Larry O'Brien trophy and get some shots up. Sure, you'd need to adjust your jump shot to account for its construction—sterling silver with a 24-karat gold vermeil—and you'd need a brave rebounder. I suppose you wouldn't be doing much "off the dribble." But when presented with such an exquisite basketball, one simply has to line up the seams and let it fly. That temptation was top of mind Monday as I examined the NBA championship trophy at the American Museum of Natural History, where it was unveiled as part of the ongoing exhibit "For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence." The trophy was actually bound for the Manhattan museum no matter who won it in June. As museum president Sean Decatur said at its unveiling, they had already been in talks with the NBA for months, and it was agreed that it'd be loaned out after the season. Only by happy coincidence was it won by a team that plays about 50 city blocks away, minimizing any carbon footprint. Essentially, its journey has been a little longer than that of a David Roth cardboard cutout, I thought. Unlike the Stanley Cup, the NBA commissions a new trophy each year so the winning franchise can keep theirs forever. Decatur told me that the trophy was a less demanding houseguest than the World Cup trophy, which the museum held for only six hours just before the start of the tournament, and had more extensive security and logistical needs. As a Knicks fan, I haven't had many previous occasions to think that hard about this trophy or study its appearance. Listed at 25.5 inches and approximately 30 pounds, it is typically held by enormous people who make it look comparatively small, so I hadn't realized that the basketball was regulation size. It was only when I came within arm's length of it that I noticed, for the first time, the column supporting the ball is not just a column but is actually patterned on one side like a net. In the old version of the trophy, that pattern was more abstract, but after a 2022 redesign it has rendered the net cord much more faithfully. At the base of the trophy are two discs, with engraved names of every past champion since 1947. The top disc has 75 team names, and the bottom disc was designed to accommodate 25 more, so the NBA can make it to its centennial before refreshing the discs. From what I could tell, "SEA SUPERSONICS" eats up the most real estate of any champion, so a revival of that franchise followed by a dynasty could potentially force a trophy refresh even sooner. I'm pulling for them.

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 discipline.

Well, that mystery has been solved. Kyle Shanahan was fishing around for his dropped phone while driving at 20 miles per hour when he crossed into the other lane and hit a car. There. Everyone satisfied? Great. Show yourselves out, and have a nice day. Well, no. Of course not. Shanahan, the coach and chief architect of the San Francisco 49ers, has been and remains off work for an extended period of time because of the crash that neither he nor the officials and general population of Palo Alto, Calif., thought was noteworthy enough to mention for 11 days. He has a concussion, broken ribs, a broken nose, 40 stitches across his face and nearly lost an eye from the deployed airbag, which among other things means that he cannot perform his very public and vital duties protecting the nation from the absence of one-thirty-second of football. And, well, nobody's required to buy any of that story, even Shanahan's belated acknowledgement that he was the one at fault rather than the 21-year-old woman driving the other car. These are not times in which anyone is or necessarily should be trusted; lying is everywhere, and liars are both prevalent and prolific. The biggest reason nobody's required to buy any of it is because of the 11 days when neither Shanahan, the 49ers, the Palo Alto police, nor TMZ's sprawling army of camera sleuths felt it worthy of mention. In doing so, they violated the basic rule of information control: The less you provide, the less control you have, because gossip abhors a vacuum, and the public will fill in the details we need to have in order to understand it in whatever way best suits our personalities, preconceptions, and sick senses of humor.