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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, Dave answers a question about holding your child back from school for a year.

The NWSL received eight complaints about either sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, or retaliation during the first half of this year, according to documents obtained by Defector Media. The reports span multiple teams, and were received between February and June.  The conclusions of any resulting investigations are redacted. So are the names of the teams involved. …

Who doesn’t love a little Normal Gossip surprise? OK, yes, we said that last week’s episode was our season finale, but when you’re sitting on a mountain of gossip stories, it would be selfish to not share more, right?  Today’s episode raises one of the ancient questions: Would you rather listen to the 10 hour version of "They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard," or explain your dietary restrictions to a pedant? Maybe this question is just another way of getting at whether you’re antisocial or just a Scorpio? Regardless of your labels, I’m pouring myself a pint and settling in for some quality time with Orlando Bloom.  Today’s gossip comes to us all the way from 2020, when circumstances conspired to put two young, mostly vegetarian van-dwellers and a retired academic in one house. There’s no escaping the questions, conversations, and dinner plans to come, though our little tumbleweeds will certainly try. 

Ed Sheeran, perhaps best known for writing the kind of music that your second cousin chooses to play for the father-daughter dance at her wedding, cemented his status as a floppy-spine dummy this week by bending the knee to American billionaire idiot Robert Kraft. After rapper Macklemore's statement on Monday that he had been dropped from Sheeran's tour due to pressure from billionaire NFL owners over his vocal support for the Palestinian people, Sheeran further beclowned himself by opting to defer responsibility for the decision of who plays on his own tour. "I was also involved in direct talks with promoters along with activists on both sides to try and find a mutual resolution for all," Sheeran wrote in a multi-bulleted Instagram statement defending his choice to allow rich guys to determine his line-up, "but the venue's and promoter's decision was final." There is no "mutual resolution for all" when you are being strong-armed like this. What's embarrassing about Sheeran's response here is that he does not seem to understand that his pants have been pulled down around his ankles. Instead of pulling them back up, or even saying that it's rude to have done this, he's tripping forward as if nothing has happened.

On Tuesday, Tottenham did something that has been out of character since the start of the 2026-27 season: It scored a goal. The goal came in the 69th minute of its third-round League Cup match against Liverpool, it came from a corner, and it ultimately didn't matter all that much. Connor Gallagher capitalized on a weak run-out from backup Pool Boys goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili and headed the ball in, giving Tottenham its first goal in any competition since its 5-1 pounding of Championship side Charlton Athletic in the previous round of the League Cup. Gallagher's header was a necessary tally, even if Tottenham eventually bowed out of the League Cup anyway by a score of 3-1, because the club has been afflicted with an offensive malaise in the Premier League never before seen in the 144-year history of Tottenham Hotspur. Maybe just seeing the ball hit the back of the net again will spark something for the club, and boy does it need a spark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oG66a7VmfY Through four Premier League games, Tottenham has scored zero goals, and only by similarly impotent chance creation and finishing from Nottingham Forest and Everton does the North London side have any points domestically. Despite spending a lot of money this summer, Spurs are currently in exactly the same spot that they have finished the last two campaigns, 17th on the table and with more questions than answers. This is the first time in the club's history that it has started a season goalless across four games. It's a new low in the series of humiliations, postponed briefly by winning the 2024-25 Europa League, that has stricken Tottenham over the last two-plus seasons.

The operative fact is that the Mets were eliminated from the playoffs on Monday. Everything about Pete Alonso's return to Queens this week as an Oriole is inseparable from that, in time but also in causation, to a subset of Mets fans. They gave him four separate standing ovations on Monday not only because he was a well-liked former player—and go ask a WFAN call screener from 2024 to see how ahistorical it would be to say he was universally beloved at the time—but because of what his absence from New York represents: a team with a $340 million payroll, again, that missed the playoffs, again. By the end of Tuesday night, it was clearer that the Alonso lovefest wasn't entirely about Alonso. The big man homered off closer Kodai Senga in the ninth to tie the game, the 300th of his career, and he reacted by throwing his bat back toward the visitors' dugout like a Thracian peltast. And then, once Alonso had circled the bases, the real fun began. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltUtyx18bWM

The YouTube title of this week's All Ball episode is “Jalen Hurts Is OVERRATED.” This sort of headline is known as “clickbait,” or “ragebait.” But what if I told you that Arif Hasan and I spent time in this episode striving toward a more nuanced version of “overrated,” a word which itself has become overrated? I bet you feel a little less rageful now. A little less baited. I bet you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, I never realized that the words ‘overrated’ and ‘good’ need not be mutually exclusive!” This is because you overrated yourself. You thought you were a genius right until this moment, but it turns out that you are are a stupid, easily led little twerp. That’s why you require the full-throated force of All Ball to become a more knowledgeable, more complete person. Also we make fun of the Packers for eating shit against Carson Wentz.

For a brief period two decades ago, Miami was an amazing place to be a fan of women's professional basketball. The team had a roster full of promise and reached the playoffs in their second season of existence. The locals showed up for games and exceeded the number of required season ticket deposits, thanks to a successful promotional campaign which included a local NBA All-Star making a publicized entrance via personal watercraft. Rosie O'Donnell, at the height of her fame, could be found in the stands cheering on the home team. It was an excellent start for a sports franchise that looked to be around for the long haul. After only three years, it all vanished. The Miami Sol joined the WNBA for the 2000 season, and were gone by November of 2002. Despite good attendance, a decent overall record, and a playoff appearance, the team suddenly folded, to the dismay of the players and the local community. The team's demise was due to the WNBA's 2003 restructuring agreement, which allowed for independent ownership that was not connected to an NBA team. This also meant that the financial responsibility for the WNBA teams moved from the centralized NBA league to the individual NBA franchises themselves. The Miami Heat declined to opt in to support the Sol's continued existence, and so the team was dissolved. As today's WNBA grows into new markets, it has also offered nostalgic hope to fans of previously defunct franchises. The other two teams that folded alongside the Sol are still in the conversation: the reborn Portland Fire, who are finishing their first season, and the Orlando Miracle, who were sold and relocated to become the Connecticut Sun (then sold again, soon to become the rebooted Houston Comets). For now, there is no similar plan for Miami. Women's pro basketball returned to the area in 2025 when the player-run league Unrivaled chose nearby Medley for its headquarters. While it's nice to see WNBA stars play three-on-three in the offseason, fans in Miami still yearn for something permanent.

The year is 2022. Movies are finally back, Bad Bunny is taking over the world, and everyone is trying to become a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The immediate post-pandemic years were strange ones along many axes, most notably the economy. In the short, six-year window following 2020, a schlubby South Bay denizen named Sam Bankman-Fried became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, watched his empire crumble, and got sent to federal prison, where he currently resides. The first episode of this season of Only If You Get Caught tells the story of the incredible rise and swift fall of SBF, and does so in this specific context. More than anything, he's a creature of the Covid economy, the odd cash-rich, activity-poor moment that defined 2020 and 2021. That moment allowed a company like FTX to become as valuable as it did because of the atomized culture of gambling that followed in Covid's wake. To help tell the story, I drafted in Jacob Silverman. Jacob is the author of three books, including Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud as well as Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He covers crypto, technology, and capitalism, and I spent the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas with him in 2025.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about college football, Reacher, unsalted snacks, and more. Your letters: Elliott: