NowLoop

It’s being shouted from all corners: The U.S. Open has become an overcrowded, overpriced circus awash in influencers, aspirational influencers, corporate stooges, drunken buffoons, brand activations, inane stunt food, weed smoke, and bettors. It is newly hostile to children, people who value personal space, and genuine fans of tennis. These louts and narcissists, armed with their ring lights and stacked empty Honey Deuce cups, are ransacking this once-dignified event. I've been attending this tournament for over two decades—I used to go to qualifiers with a brown-bag lunch—so I’ve been hearing some version of this complaint for years, but never at such a pitch as right now. Sometimes I don’t buy that the writer has been paying close enough attention to the tournament over time, but sometimes it’s all articulated succinctly by a diehard. I agree with the overall spirit that animates these complaints: The U.S. Open is no longer what we remember it to be, and it's getting pretty weird as it tries to figure out what it will be next. Lest we romanticize the past, many aspects of the current circus have held steady throughout the tournament’s 21st-century existence. It is not scandalizing to learn that America's biggest tennis tournament is a shrine to conspicuous consumption. And the good parts of the U.S. Open are still life-affirmingly good. My eyelid, like yours, might twitch when I read that Craig Tiley, the recently installed CEO of the United States Tennis Association, wants to make the tournament more like "tennis Disneyland," but I don’t know if the organizers are necessarily at fault for the present malaise. The Open appears to be drawing in more fan interest than ever before, which falls in line with the USTA’s mission statement of growing tennis participation in this country. If there’s a problem here, it might merely lie in mankind. At the intersection of broader disconcerting trends—everything is phone, everything is gambling, and nobody knows how to be around each other in public—lies the 2026 U.S. Open.

The first line of Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party sets the tone of the whole book. She writes, “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” We have been dropped into yet another one of Mandel’s post-apocalyptic worlds, but, as with Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, it retains a vivid glimmer of hope and life.  The book introduces Ari as our protagonist, but, as with other Mandel books, she is not our only main character. The first section of the novel is called the A side, and begins with a party in Los Angeles where something strange happens. We quickly come to find out that this isn’t our only world. A parallel universe, this record's B side, features many of the same people and places. Both worlds contain a sought-after painting, but where Ari’s America is grappling with the fallout of a second Civil War, this other version is a surveillance state. At first glance the B side appears more orderly than the A side, but we swiftly learn that neither world is a preferable future iteration of our own.  I spoke with Mandel ahead of Exit Party's release about time, multiple lives, and her unique revision method. Our conversation has been lightly edited.

Go ahead and listen to this. (For the real perverts, use this one; you just know you're about to stay up until 1:00 a.m. for a particularly shitty Sharks–Mighty Ducks game.) What does it evoke? What do you think of? More specifically, who do you think of? You immediately know you're about to spend some time with Barry Melrose, the formative face—and hair—of an entire generation of American hockey fans. Melrose died Wednesday at age 70, three years after he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which forced him to retire from ESPN, where he had spent more than three decades as the network's lead hockey analyst. Paired with John Buccigross in the studio or Steve Levy in the booth, or sometimes Bill Pidto or John Saunders, Melrose was simultaneously a voice of reason and an outsized cartoon character. If a team was ass he'd say they were ass, in a way that few, more diplomatic broadcasters ever would. And he'd deliver his pronouncements from within an immaculately tailored suit and beneath one of the continent's finest and most immovable mullets. His style imparted a sort of hockey gravitas: You wouldn't trust a guy like that to sell you a used car, but you'd sure as hell trust him to tell you what's up with the Calgary Flames' power play.

The National Football League is back, in case you haven't already been lectured, hectored, and badgered into aural submission by the various communication venues that have been screeching about it for weeks. This post-modern Christmas, with all the soul-crushing commercialism that implies, has come five days later than last year, because the league decided it needed one more week of buildup before beginning its full 22-week Advent calendar, and that it wanted to see how strange football might feel on a Wednesday night. You're welcome. Some innovation was warranted here, just given the running start that college football's naked greed, maniacal volume, and high level of resting chaos has given it. The NFL is more button-down and billionaires-up by contrast, and as such has struggled to embrace its inner WTF-ness. Sure, the league gave it a reasonable go between the 49ers' criminally eventful offseason and Mike Vrabel's clumsy media relations course, but mostly it stuck to the same menu it has operated on for years: 272 big events, then the playoffs. They couldn't even expose any nerve endings with a new contract for Roger Goodell, the Ginger Avenger-turned-bank-manager who is either going to die in the job or already has. College football's first week featured a program that bent the rules of time to suit its immediate needs; the NFL basically announced grand opening of the same old supermarket, only with the big innovation being fewer checkers. In other words, the NFL is selling you the game as usual. After the first NFL game of the season last night, you are more than entitled to ask, "OK, what else ya got?"

The science fiction author William Gibson's pithy observation that "the future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed" has had different shades of meaning since it was first formulated. In its original context, Gibson meant it as a measure of technological progress: certain people have access to gizmos, gadgets, and virtual-reality dugongs before that blessed day when those innovations trickle down to the rest of us. There has always been an economic valence to this quote: Its first full appearance includes a mention of the “elite.” Over time, though, what I might call the post-Gibson interpretation of this insight tended increasingly toward economic inequality and left the technological aspect behind, since economic security is the axis along which "difference" has seemed to vary the most meaningfully across society since, say, the dawn of the iPhone, and "progress" stopped feeling like the right way to describe how technology has been changing once we all started to pack more computational power in our pockets than what was necessary to take humans to the moon. The most salient ways the rich differ from us these days no longer seems to lie in the technological horsepower they can harness, but more in the privacy they can rely on, the laws they can break, the impunity with which they can disregard the social compact, the scorn they can have for the future of the planet, and more. Or so I've heard. But the uneven temporal and spatial impact of technology qua technology is having its moment again. Your experience of driverless cars is a lot different if you live in the Bay Area or Boston; the quality of your drinking water and the size of your electric bill depends on your proximity to a data center; and so on at ever finer scales, intruding on the neighborhood level, depending on how down your neighbors are with Flock cameras.

Who knew Ben Shelton could do all that? Certainly not the Defector writer who was slandering him in the early stages of the match as "John Isner with WiFi." The 23-year-old American revealed levels to his game heretofore unseen, over the course of a U.S. Open quarterfinal that technically began Tuesday night but was mostly played early Wednesday morning. Matched up against defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, Shelton hit the apex of his career at 3:33 a.m., when he wrapped up the deciding set tiebreak to win 6-7(5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6(7) and advance to his second Open semifinal. In the great tradition of 21st-century American men's tennis players, Shelton's key weapon is his serve, which he hits not just with peerless top-end speed (he reached 149 mph in this match) but also a rich variety of spin and location. Bouncy and explosive, the 6-foot-4 Shelton has more to his game than the servebots of yore, but if you were to isolate the one reason that he's made it into the top 10, it's clearly that shot. Over the past 52 weeks, he has held serve 90.4 percent of the time, second on tour behind Jannik Sinner, per Tennis Abstract. Counterbalancing that dominance is his return game, which is the worst of any top-50 player on tour, as measured by break percentage (13.1) or return points won (31.9 percent). Big strong Ben can generate incredible racket head speed when he takes heavy cuts at the ball, but has struggled with the finer control of his racket face on shorter backswings, when rushed from the baseline or dealing with incoming serves. That's why Shelton, who has a reputation as a great entertainer, can actually be a rather choppy watch: He struggles to keep returns in play, and has a limited tolerance for longer rallies. Both traits have improved since he first arrived on tour, but not enough, I thought, to test gatekeepers Sinner and Alcaraz, who had removed Shelton from three Slams in 2025. (A shoulder injury retired him from the fourth.)

At my university, you had to take an introductory fiction writing workshop before you were eligible to apply for the more advanced workshops. Admission to these big leagues was by no means guaranteed. The first time I got in, I experienced about a week of absolute elation followed by several months of intermittent terror and imposter syndrome. At the time, it all felt very high-stakes, which is perhaps why I was so profoundly distressed when I showed up on the first day and realized that 90 percent of the class brought little black Moleskines to the table in lieu of normal notebooks. I rectified the problem immediately, of course, but the psychic damage was done.  Today’s story is about another fledgling taking her first steps into another artistic realm: the theater. What better backdrop for a bunch of young people to take everything too seriously, from their roller skates to their dramaturgy, from their secret affairs to their reviews in the campus newspaper? Get ready to be revolutionized by disco Les Misérables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCKQz0jduY4

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season (except when the season starts on a Wednesday; kiss my ass, Goodell). Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I turn 50 a month from now. Hold your applause. About the only notable thing about hitting 50 is that I will no longer be eligible for a midlife crisis, seeing as how my life will officially be well past its midway point. I can believe in a Singularity-aided immortality all I like, but the facts remain what they are. There’s more behind me than there is ahead of me now, and what’s behind me isn’t always easy to keep track of. It’s getting harder, if I’m being honest. Because there’s a LOT of life to remember when you’re on the cusp of 50. Sometimes I find myself quietly aghast at some of the stats. I’ve been a parent now for 20 years, a stretch of time that defies my comprehension even though I was there for all of it. I’ve been cooking for our household for an even longer period of time, to the point where I can pour out a cup of rice perfectly without even looking at the measuring lines. Ta-fucking-da.

The time has once again come to break the rules: Only If You Get Caught is back for Season 2. If you listened to the first season, welcome back; if you didn’t, you have six days to do so before the show returns on Sept. 15. You can listen to the trailer here. OIYGC is…

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 helping your child find a best friend.