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Thanks to the luck of the draw and the blessing of the soccer gods, Monday was the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland took the field in back-to-back-to-back matches. Thanks to sheer superhuman talent on display from the trio, Monday was also the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland scored at least two goals each. If the World Cup is a global celebration of soccer, then the 2026 World Cup Golden Boot race is a localized celebration of superstardom, a triple showdown that could even blossom into a four-way melee (Harry Kane plays his second game on Tuesday after scoring a brace of his own in his first against Croatia) heading into the final group stage round. Just when one guy has seemed to pull ahead, the other two have caught up immediately after, and only one goal separates the current leader from his two much younger challengers. That current leader is, of course, Messi. After picking up two more goals on Monday against Austria, he has scored all five of Argentina's goals at this World Cup. Noted Messi worshipper Billy Haisley already covered the D10S's feats, so I will instead just highlight Messi's touch to control the ball ahead of Monday's second goal, and then move on. But seriously, what a touch:

For half a century, a house on the coast in southern Lebanon has kept vigil over Al-Mansouri beach and the blue Mediterranean waters beyond. Mona Khalil's grandfather built the house in the 1970s, around seven miles from the border with Israel. A decade later, the Khalil family fled the Lebanese Civil War and left the house behind. Khalil eventually settled in the Netherlands and found work as a porcelain restorer. In 1999, on a visit to her grandparents' old home, Khalil walked along the shores, a beer in hand, when she heard a soft crunch. She watched, mesmerized, as a sea turtle lugged herself across the sand to lay her eggs, each soft and white and big as a ping-pong ball. This turtle altered the course of Khalil's life. After she learned Lebanon's sea turtles were under threat, she devoted her days to protecting them. The following year, Khalil moved back into the house, which she painted tangerine—a tribute to the safe haven she had found in the Netherlands—and transformed into a conservation hub with a partner, a woman named Habiba Fayed. This became the Orange House Project, a bed and breakfast where guests could help clean litter off the beach, watch for turtle tracks, and monitor nests. In a 2017 interview, Khalil vowed to continue this work "as long as God gives me life." Earlier this month, on June 4, an Israeli airstrike hit the Orange House and grievously wounded Khalil and burned another woman. On June 19, the 77-year-old Khalil died of her injuries, one of the 4,175 people killed in Israeli attacks across Lebanon since March 2. (Lebanon's health ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.)

If there is a funnier MLB broadcast duo than Jason Benetti and Andy Dirks, I am not familiar with their work. Regardless of how the Tigers are playing, you can guarantee that Benetti will arrive at the booth ready to pepper his play-by-play with clever one-liners, deep-cut references and an extended bit or two. Of all his rotating partners in his couple years calling Detroit baseball, the modest, folksy Dirks has proven the most able and game to follow along with Benetti and—perhaps occasionally—egg him on. Even by my high standards for these two, the bottom of the fourth in Monday's Tigers-Yankees game was pretty hilarious. After the first hitter of the inning, the Yankee defense took notice of the ballpark's tiny second-base "dirt cam," which for whatever reason had made itself conspicuous. The production crew gave viewers a dirt-eye view of the Yankees' curiosity, and then their attempt to bury the camera. The televised soundtrack to their attack on dirt cam was Benetti and Dirks voicing the anxieties of the persecuted camera, then eventually just making the sounds kids make when they bang action figures together. Note that, while Benetti usually gets more of the credit for the broadcast's humor, it's the former player Dirks who initially speaks in first person as the dirt cam.

Waist Deep, the debut novel and international bestseller by Danish writer Linea Maja Ernst, reads like it's inspired equally by television sitcoms and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The premise of Waist Deep fits both genres, with an ensemble cast in a cinematic location: Five old friends from university, plus two partners, plus two children, all reunite at a summer house on a remote lake in Denmark for a week. The one where the gang gets back together!  Once everyone is there, the hosts, Karen and Esben, announce their plan to get married at the end of the week, surrounded by their friends. The one with the surprise wedding! But like any friend group, there are subterranean tensions and histories, old crushes that revive in new locations. You can already picture the tagline rife with suspense: Will their relationships survive the week? Like a play, or even a title sequence, Waist Deep begins with a cast of characters, mapping out relationships and personalities before the narrative gets going. There are the five old friends from university: 

It's over! The Milwaukee Bucks finally did it: Late Monday night, they picked the better of two competing offers and finally agreed to ship out differently gruntled superstar and franchise icon Giannis Antetokounmpo. That deal sent him to the Miami Heat in exchange for a blockbuster haul of players and draft picks. It's been a long and torturous process for Antetokounmpo and the Bucks, who for the most part have enjoyed and profited by one another for 13 years now. Milwaukee, understandably, has been reluctant to bail on the Antetokounmpo era: A consequence of employing one of the sport's two or three best players in a star-driven league is it is all but impossible to deal that guy away for anything approaching equal present value. Giannis, meanwhile, has been caught between competing priorities. On the one hand, he wants to be seen publicly as loyal, gung-ho, and committed to the Bucks for life—he wore a Bucks green shirt and watchband to the paddock at the Monaco Grand Prix this month—and on the other hand he wants to spend the next chapter of his Hall of Fame–quality career contending for another championship, a goal he'd determined, reasonably and correctly, he could no longer pursue with the only NBA employer he'd ever known. Frustration over the state of Milwaukee's basketball operation had started to curdle the smiling, smothie-loving goofball of happier times and damage Antetokounmpo's relationship with fans. Losing made him sour and whiny, and as the Bucks contorted their operation to prop open their window of contention, it became impossible to ignore that they were also employing several Antetokounmpo brothers at a time. A deeply gross personal sponsorship deal with the sleazy prediction market Kalshi eroded anyone's image of Giannis as someone whose fundamental decency would tend to steer him away from the more nakedly corrupt and exploitive scams of our current moment; meanwhile, Giannis helped himself not at all by booing Milwaukee's disapproving fans during a gruesome blowout home loss to the crippled Minnesota Timberwolves. He is also, it turns out, an inattentive landlord. Long before the Bucks shut him down for the 2025–26 season in mid-March, Antetokounmpo had started to look like a sweaty petulant loser. Off the court, he was bleating about his commitment to the Bucks franchise while working with his agent, not at all secretly, to engineer an escape. He had become exhausting.

In March, Vivian, an undocumented transgender sex worker from the state of Chiapas, Mexico, was driving from San Diego to her house in Santa Ana when her biggest fear came true: She was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a traffic checkpoint. "Thank God they let me go," she says. But she fears one day they might not. Last year her friend Sadis was working at a hotel in Saddle Brook, N.J, when police attempted to detain her. "She jumped into an Uber to try to get away," Vivian says. Police caught up. Sadis was arrested, handed over to DHS, and sent back to Honduras. A week after arriving she was tortured, possibly by gang members; they were never caught. "They threw her off a bridge like an animal," Vivian says. Sadis didn't survive.  Though Vivian has an asylum case pending in New York, that is no guarantee that in the meantime she won't be sent to a detention center or deported, as so many have as they await their hearings. The legal asylum process can take years as court dates are delayed because judges have been fired and immigration courts are closing, says Isa Noyola of the Transgender Law Center, where she directs their Border Butterflies Project, an LGBTQ+ immigration services program that has offices in Oakland and Tijuana. There is a backlog of 3,288,166 cases in immigration courts nationwide, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. 

After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causing the traditionally stodgy tournament to post heatedly about the occasion. Williams retired from competition after a third-round appearance at the 2022 U.S. Open. Her first-round match at Wimbledon will mark her first professional singles match since that day. She won the grass-court major seven times, most recently in 2016. In her last appearance in 2022, she lost in the first round. When Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool at the end of 2025, I thought we were about to witness an extremely effortful marketing campaign for the telehealth company her husband Alexis Ohanian invests in, and the GLP-1 drugs it prescribes. Since her original retirement, she has appeared regularly in ads for the company, and credited the drugs with losing 34 pounds before her return to competition.

The San Francisco Giants are a stinking cesspool of bad vibes and bad baseball. That is not the newsy part of this post. Sure, the Giants' place in the standings (currently 15 games below .500) and the collection of petulant homophobes on the roster have given the public plenty of reason not to prod this smoldering heap of a franchise with a ten-foot pole. But the Giants seem determined to expose every part of their dysfunction, and will not rest until they have created a public nuisance to rival the peeling paint and chemicals of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.  On Sunday, with Rafael Devers on first and the Giants trailing the Marlins by a single run in the bottom of the ninth inning, manager Tony Vitello planned on putting in Jonah Cox as a pinch runner. Cox is fast; Devers isn’t. The Giants need to win games. This is simple stuff, really. But even with these indisputable facts to back him up, Vitello clearly is not considered a great authority among the Giants, and Devers especially wasn’t having it. With a mesmerizing finger wag, the form of which was far more elegant than his running form has ever been, Devers signaled that he was not going to get taken out of the game. 

Fresh off reasserting his extraterrestrial talent by opening his sixth World Cup with a hat trick, Lionel Messi proved on Monday that he is in fact still human. Seven minutes into the match between Argentina and Austria, Lautaro Martínez sprinted through on goal only to be taken down by a pair of Austrian defenders. After a VAR review, the play was correctly called a penalty. Messi took the ball, placed it on the spot, and proceeded to do what he has done many times before: miss. The failed penalty seemed to affect both Messi and the team as a whole. Despite starting the game with the cool confidence typical of this group of world champions, Argentina looked uncharacteristically tentative and anxious after the miss. Austria took advantage, grabbing the match's reins and holding them for the next 20 minutes. Again, the failed conversion and the evident nerviness in the aftermath made for a rare humanizing moment for a man so often described as an alien or even a god. There's a valuable lesson in there: Not even D10S is perfect. Oh, and the rest of the game? Argentina won, 2-0. Messi scored both goals. He now has five for the tournament, and has officially risen above Miroslav Klose and Marta as the player with the most goals ever scored at the World Cup.

Alan Greenspan died Monday. The longtime Fed chairman was once hailed as the most powerful man in the world. Greenspan was 100 years old. Back to me: A couple of cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends of mine wrote a book that came out in the summer of 2009, and other cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends threw them a party. Some of the most powerful people in the city, meaning some of the most powerful people in the world, were invited. They also put me on the guest list. The invite said the party would tip off at 6:30 p.m., but I found no dress code, and I'm thinking the hosts know what they're gonna get couture-wise from McKenna, so as usual I just take whatever's risen to the top of the pile in the walk-on closet in my bedroom and throw it on. I show up an hour late at a beautiful house in the tony Kalorama neighborhood, and when I walk inside I hear all the noise coming from the backyard, which has an entrance to the side of the front door, and I look out the windows and see everybody looking fancy as hell and face the fact I fucked up, fashion-wise. Plus it's D.C. hot outside, and my car air conditioning had been broken for years, so I’m sweating like Marion Barry and the AC inside the house feels real boss. So instead of immediately going out back, I keep walking past that backyard entrance and toward the kitchen to see if there's anybody lagging in the house who I can bother while I decompress and let my pores close, but I quickly determine that everybody's outside and I better join the party before I'm caught wandering the halls.