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The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now. In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentially be a repeat of 1992, as it would also feature a Bush versus a Clinton—in this case, former Florida governor and younger ­brother of 43, Jeb Bush, versus former First Lady and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. When asked by Chuck Todd how he would likely depict the 2016 candidates, Trudeau stated, “I have a long history of unpacking the baggage of the Bush ­family.” He added that it would be hard to draw Hillary Clinton ­because “­we’re just waiting for her to make ­mistakes.” But in the end, Trudeau would never draw a strip about either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, because the 2016 election became a nonstop Donald Trump reality TV show.

There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course: Are they any good?  It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Since 2021, only two of the NWSL’s six expansion teams have made the playoffs—San Diego Wave in 2022 and Bay FC in 2024—and the rest have finished closer to the table’s basement. Evaluating an expansion team by their results, then, is a recipe for disappointment. But there’s a better metric out there, one that corresponds to the NWSL’s best trait: chaos. When I’m judging a new team, what I’m looking for is fun. If I tune into a game they’re playing, am I going to have a good time? Ten games into its existence, the Denver Summit already has me answering that question in the affirmative. They began the season with a bang—their inaugural match, a loss against Bay, included three total goals and a red card for the new squad. They went on to take points from both of the league’s most recent champions, tying the Orlando Pride 1-1 and beating Gotham 2-0. Then came a couple of duds: scoreless draws against Washington and Gotham. Those goose eggs seem to have steeled Denver’s determination to make things happen moving forward, and since the April international window, each game they’ve played in has been full of goals.

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives little clue as to what could happen inside its cover. Behind the title there are several misshapen die with colorful dots and crumbling edges. It is a strange book, with a strange protagonist, and a sentence structure so mesmerizing that I couldn’t put it down.  When I picked up this book, I had no understanding of it except that it was “about baseball.” But the book isn’t about baseball, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s about a version of baseball that exists only in the mind of the book's protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, who lives alone in an apartment, neglects his job as an accountant, and has pastrami sandwiches delivered to him so that he can spend all of his time working as the commissioner of a baseball league he has made up in his vivid imagination. Each game is played with die rolls that determine how a batter performs at the plate and what happens to the ball. The keys have been built over decades of play by himself. The teams themselves have backstories, difficulties, and histories. There are events that exist inside the world of the league that are not real and yet impact the behavior of the players, who are also not real. There are songs that Henry has written for the league, up-and-coming stars, and a Hall of Fame he keeps meticulously in a book on his shelf.  This kind of world creation is similar to the work of creating a novel. You as the creator invent people and give them problems. You build out a world for them to exist in and hope that they behave in certain ways. At some point, you forget that you’ve made it all up, that none of these people are real, that if one of them is behaving in a way that does not function narratively, you can simply make them do something else, or delete them from the story altogether. The work of creation of any kind is often dangerously close to the work of disassociation from the world you actually live in, and Coover displays this with terrifying, mesmerizing clarity. 

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a tuxedo cat, approximately 8.5 pounds and 1 year old. Second, I made new friends who have two cats of their own: A tortico former mother named Guagua (or 瓜瓜, a cute way of saying "melon" or "gourd" in Chinese), who is perhaps the most perfect and angelic cat I have ever met, and a weird little man named Sesame. Our three protagonists are pictured below. Clementine (left), Guagua (center), and Sesame (right). Not to scale; though Sesame is, as previously mentioned, a "weird little man," he is physically huge. While I met Clementine first, my self-employment as cat tutor only started when I met Guagua and Sesame, and my friends told me that Guagua knew tricks. I had never before met a cat in real life who knew tricks. The trick-knowing cats I saw on various internet platforms appeared to me like unusually dignified and intelligent creatures, sometimes upsettingly purebred, and now Guagua—a normal cat from the streets of Philadelphia who does not have teeth—had proved herself part of that circle. She demonstrated her suite of tricks: sit, spin, paw, other paw, high-five, other high-five, down, and going wherever she was pointed. She was, it was clear to me, a genius, and also extremely food-motivated, which in animals tends to be related.

This past Saturday, Barcelona Femení met OL Lyonnes in the Champions League final and crushed them by a score of 4-0. The scoreline was a little misleading, but only a little. On one hand, the first half of the match tilted heavily in Lyon's favor. The French team put their Spanish counterparts to the sword, dominating Barça in a way no opponent has probably since Lyon won this very matchup four years ago. Only great penalty-box defending and heroics from Cata Coll in goal kept Lyon from getting the go-ahead goal they by all rights deserved. On the other hand, if the present moment of European club soccer, and arguably women's soccer as a whole, could rightfully be described as the Barcelona era, it's because the Blaugrana has more exceptional players than anyone else, players with long histories of coming up big in the difficult, decisive moments that separate victory from defeat. From the second half's outset, Barça looked like a different team, one better equipped to escape the man-to-man press that had stymied them so thoroughly in the first 45 minutes. Where Lyon earlier had had its chances to convert its run-of-play superiority into a scoreboard lead but let them go begging, Barça was ruthless. In the 55th minute, Ewa Pajor put Barcelona ahead with the game's opening goal, and already it felt like the match had taken its final shape. A fatigued Lyon sought more open, direct attacks in an attempt to get back into the game, which only presented Barça more time and space in which to keep the ball and attack. Pajor struck again in the 69th minute, more or less putting the result out of Lyon's reach, and a pair of late strikes from Salma Paralluelo killed any chance of a comeback. The gaudy final scoreline might not have reflected the tension of the match, but did testify to the greater omnipotence this Barcelona team has demonstrated over and over for the better part of a decade now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yI9ng8Yp7A&t=1s&pp=ygUOYmFyY2Vsb25hIGx5b27SBwkJDQsBhyohjO8%3D

The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of all those grudges. They were highly and sometimes objectionably competitive men, and as such were held to be villains of a sort during their careers. In both cases, their brilliance became easier to acknowledge after the hesitations and qualifications related to all that were shocked back into perspective by their deaths. Busch died at age 41, due to sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That shockingly untimely death ended a nearly two-decade run as the driver who most, in the words of fellow driver Ryan Blaney, "made you feel inadequate, and [made] you feel talentless because you see him do these things, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know how he does it. I really don’t understand it.’" He was the hardest of chargers, a man who suffered competitors sporadically and fools not at all; before he died, Busch could be equally commodious and disputatious depending on the day. This was the result of the work he'd done and had to do, and his general mood. If that is villainy, then the world is full of them. Lemieux was equally notable on the merits. Over 21 years in hockey, he had compiled four Stanley Cups and 459 goals in combined regular seasons and playoffs; he ranked sixth overall in playoff goals with 80, and was regarded as one the game's elite defensive forwards. This was not what he was best known for, though. He was best known for the vicious hit he put on Detroit's Kris Draper that was so egregious—Lemieux checked Draper from behind into the boards during the 1996 Western Conference final, breaking Draper’s jaw, nose, and cheekbone—that it sparked not just a brawl in that game but a rivalry between the Red Wings and Lemieux's Colorado Avalanche that lasted until well after Lemieux left the Avs and the Wings had turned over their management and roster. ESPN made a documentary about the rivalry, back when documentaries were actually documents rather than self-preening projects. The sentence "You hated his guts until he was on your team" was invoked so often in Lemieux's case that, had it come with a price tag per use, his family would have enjoyed generational wealth through the remainder of this century.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is making big moves. This week, she declined to renew the contract of 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on the hellish conditions at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was pulled off the air last December for not offering enough deference to the Trump administration; Alfonsi was one of three departures from the program. Weiss also installed Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of her network's flagship newsmagazine program. If you're having trouble remembering who Bilton is, that's because he's a specific type of dolt from a bygone era. There was a moment in the media industry in which one could build a lucrative career by being a guy with glasses and branding oneself as a tech reporter who "covers the intersection of technology and culture." Bilton spent many years executing this maneuver at The New York Times, where he edged out some stiff competition to briefly claim the title of the paper's worst columnist. His greatest hits include a column about the time he couldn't find a pen, and one about the cancer risks presented by wearable technology that was so factually fucked, it now contains a 203-word editor's note and a 98-word correction. Bilton eventually left the Times for Vanity Fair, where he got busy pretending like he was the one who'd owned the Theranos story and getting all googly-eyed over the Apple Vision Pro, which he promised was "taking us into the future, into a new era of computing." I guess technically the jury's still out on that one.

When the dead body of Timmy the humpback whale beached itself last week off the shores of the Danish island of Anholt, it was only a matter of time before Timmy would risk of the fate that befalls many a beached whale: https://twitter.com/achillghost/status/2058958519747887516 The residents of Anholt, per the BBC, have watched Timmy slowly balloon in size as its guts and stomach begin to decompose. Timmy's body, skin taut and distended by gases, now lolls around a sandbank a short distance from the beach and drifting in the shallow waves. As one German television channel aired a livestream of its dead body, the channel included the number of a suicide hotline.

With less than three minutes to play in the first half of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant drove past Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and threw down a huge, nasty, two-handed dunk, pushing the Spurs' lead to 12 and sending the home crowd's decibel level into Krakatoan territory. When Devin Vassell immediately followed it at the other end by rejecting Chet Holmgren's point-blank dunk attempt and woofing in the dead-eyed noodleman's face about it, Thursday's game seemed on the verge of breaking open. It had been threatening to do that ever since the Spurs opened the night on a 9-2 run. The Oklahoma City Thunder reeled it back in, as they reliably do. Alex Caruso beat the shot clock with a three to salvage that possession, Gilgeous-Alexander hit a tough midrange shot and a pair of free throws, and Cason Wallace splashed a three. By the time the halftime buzzer sounded, San Antonio's lead instead was a manageable seven points. But the game had a pattern, one deeply unfavorable to the defending champs: The Thunder were grinding for every look they got, discombobulated and frantic, never more than a hair ahead of San Antonio's relentless ball pressure and warp-speed defensive rotations. Every basket they got felt like a completed Hail Mary. Meanwhile the Spurs were (relatively speaking) breezing through possessions, getting to their spots, running into threes off Oklahoma City's misses, muscling their way to the rim for tough, chesty interior buckets. It recalled Game 4 of last spring's East final, with the Thunder in the role of the scrambling New York Knicks and the Spurs as the Indiana Pacers: one team bailing water out of a rapidly leaking boat, the other team the ocean. Even the implacable Thunder can only stave off the ocean for so long. The teams traded buckets for the first few minutes of the third quarter, but Oklahoma City was in trouble. Three of their first four baskets of the half came via Isaiah Hartenstein's fuck-ass floater and a pair of tip-ins off misses, papering over aimless possessions. Sometimes this sort of thing amounts to a team staying afloat long enough to get the pumps running. Other times it is a sign that the boat is sinking.

The most maddening moments the New York Liberty have to offer are not the bad ones—not the turnovers, the biffed layups, the “just vibes” possessions on offense—but the moments here and there when things click and the whole team starts to play well. Those flashes of competence suggest there’s a switch that can be flipped for these nominal championship contenders. The maddening part is how rarely the Liberty seem inclined to flip it.  If we learned anything from their 84-74 win over the Phoenix Mercury on Wednesday, it’s that booing can flip the switch. A usually forgiving Brooklyn crowd started to grumble when the home team came out of halftime looking lifeless. It worked! The Liberty’s full-court press forced nine Mercury turnovers in the quarter, and they ended the third on a 23-0 run. It was enough to snap their three-game losing streak and bring them back to .500 on the season.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyiImT6Wg54