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Some people are fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Cincinnati Bengals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-ZZLXoDQQ

In tennis, it can be pleasant to play under the flag of an underrepresented country with a large diaspora. Essentially, you have a network of sleeper cells who can be activated all over the world. They are extremely willing to spend money to come watch you play, and extremely loud, because to them you are one of the most important sportspeople alive. A player in these circumstances doesn't have to reach the absolute peak of the sport to have this effect on people. Brazilian fans go nuts for blue-chip prospect Joao Fonseca. Turkish fans turn up for recent top-50 debut Zeynep Sonmez. But nobody out there is doing it quite like the Filipinos and Alex Eala. The 21-year-old from Metro Manila inspired mass devotion during her breakout semifinal run at the Miami Open last year, and probably would have continued to do so if her career petered off immediately after that. Instead, as she's surged into the top 20 this summer, Eala is solidifying a place on tour for both her own curious game and her colossal fan base. Last week, Eala competed for the first time at the D.C. Open. Mark Ein, chairman of the tournament, said that his staff had been courting her since the spring. He also said that about 80 percent of the inquiries to the tournament's ticketing department were about when Eala was playing. "Honestly, I think it's more, and they just didn't want to say it was more, but they're, like, virtually all. It's not an exaggeration," he said. The Philippines haven't produced an athlete of this international prominence since Manny Pacquiao. Eala held onto the crowd in D.C. even when opposed by an international superstar like Naomi Osaka or a top-ranked American like Jessica Pegula. Flags flapped and Tagalog chants boomed. Eala rewarded all that fan interest on Monday by winning the title—her first at the tour level—after upsetting the tournament's top three seeds in her final three rounds. Giant-killing was at the center of the Eala origin story, and it remains a distinctive feature of her career. This summer, her lefty repertoire has looked strong enough to suggest that she could herself become a giant.

Davene Roseborough still can’t believe the number of foster homes she lived in that had locks on the refrigerators and cabinets. At one spot, Roseborough was barred from eating dinner if she wasn’t home by 6:00 p.m. That place didn’t last long, though. She was bounced from home to home from the time she entered foster care at the age of eight to the time she aged out at 18. Those years were characterized by rampant physical and sexual abuse, for which her foster parents received a $1,200 a monthly stipend. By the time she had her own child, she exemplified the kind of mother scrutinized by the very family policing system that raised her—Black, former system involvement, survivor of abuse, mental health struggles. Sure enough, her son was eventually taken from her and placed in the foster system for five years, where he also experienced abuse. The Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City agency tasked with investigating allegations of child abuse and neglect, has been algorithmically encoding this kind of profiling since 2018. Before DOGE lived and died, before ICE contracted Palantir to supercharge mass deportation, before ChatGPT even launched, ACS was already using AI. What started with a single predictive analytics score meant to identify children at a high risk of severe harm has since grown into a six algorithm suite of surveillance, which operates with very little public oversight. Yearly AI disclosures required by city law don’t include detailed information about what data the algorithms are trained on, or how exactly they are used by caseworkers. Despite the lack of transparency, what is evident is that the algorithms function as an expensive way to perpetuate the status quo—encoding extant and extreme human biases in the family policing system into algorithmic ones, and enabling a policing agency to claim it has the technical capacity to oversee the welfare of New York’s nearly two million children.

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 talking to your child about death.

It used to be that all the normal, real people of this great nation could set aside political and religious differences, and even a well-calibrated distaste for Bostonians, and come together in our pure and righteous hatred of the New York Yankees. Now it's all confused: The Yankees—once such an inevitability that Bob Costas invoked the word "socialism" to describe how collective action could force them from the mountaintop—are no longer the sport's big bullies. Hell, they're no longer even the grotesque profligate silver-spooners of their own damn town. If what grossed you out about the Yankees in the last millennium was their habit of buying your team's best players every year, probably now you have trained your white-hot contempt on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now there exists a widening schism between those who hate the Yankees only when they are rich and successful, and those of us who hate them for purer, longer-enduring reasons, namely that they are the favorite team of Barry Petchesky. It is because I am a true Yankee hater—a shit-hearted ghoul who takes open delight in their failures due to grievances that would register as obscure and possibly demented to a properly adjusted baseball fan of the 21st century—that I have been prepared for frankly an embarrassing length of time to loathe George Lombard Jr. To me there is almost nothing more dreadful than a hotshot young Yankees shortstop. It should go without saying that I have delighted very much in the humiliating struggles of Anthony Volpe, who was booted down to Triple-A this week in order to clear a spot for Lombard's ascent. It strikes me as a personal attack against my own peace of mind that the Yankees, in Lombard, have another next Derek Jeter queued up, to take the sting off of the abject failure of the last one. I have been snarling at Lombard's presence on prospect lists for years, in the way that a vampire snarls at garlands of garlic. Because he is a Yankee shortstop, Lombard will not need to produce like a superstar to be considered one. Lombard has in common with the poor discarded husk he is replacing that he is a highly regarded defensive shortstop and a very good athlete, and that his hitting is expected to come around, enough to make him a perfectly solid everyday player but perhaps never enough to justify the 15 All-Star team appearances he is certain to "earn." Lombard comes from a baseball family: His dad cobbled together eight years of big-league service as a very occasional, very part-time journeyman outfielder, then went into coaching and is now the bench coach for the Detroit Tigers. His younger brother Jacob, also a shortstop, was drafted 14th overall in July by the Miami Marlins.

If we have learned anything from decades of superhero movies, it's that people love a vigilante. Something lurks deep in the hearts of most of us, but is it a sense of justice or something else? If you had the opportunity to go rogue—to solve a crime or right a wrong on your very own, or even just steal back something that was once yours—would you? Today’s gossip revolves around a woman whose opportunity to embody justice, in the form of hunting down her stolen Kia, fell on the day of the funeral of her girlfriend’s beloved track coach. What’s the right thing to do, under circumstances like these?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXFS88rZ4yw

Now that I am back from France, so too is Nothing But Respect back from its brief summer break. This week on the show, Harry and I caught up and chatted about the Tour de France and the way I covered the race for Defector; Harry's experimental forays into vertical video; and the ongoing Kyle Kuzma Massive Thinks situation. Harry also makes a fantastic NBA player comparison for a certain former guest and current NBA staffer's game. Also, we always plug the Broke Jumper Tip Line in these posts, but there will be a dedicated BJTL episode coming soon, so please do submit those.

A couple weeks ago, I bought an apple cider slushie at the farmer's market. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the ice crystals in the slushie sparkled and burst in my mouth with crisp acidity that immediately cooled me down. The cider had been made by the farmers who ran the stand so it wasn't too sweet, just the platonic ideal of apple flavor somehow frozen into slushie form. Before I took another sip, I pulled out my phone to snap a picture of it. The rich brown of the slushie was framed by cartons of fresh, local blueberries. A light layer of condensation had just started to form on the outside of the cup. It was the perfect encapsulation of a lovely summer day in my town.  Later, I posted the photo to my Instagram story. No caption, just the ordinary proof-of-life type of content I post to my personal social media that serves as a digital record of the life I'm living. It blended in with the endless stream of similar photos and videos in my feed, which I scrolled through to catch up on what my friends, acquaintances, and even enemies have been up to.  There's nothing exceptional about what I did. The act of documenting life on the internet has become so commonplace that it is unremarkable, and yet the act of documentation—who does it, and how—continues to incite debate as people's digital selves impose more and more on their meatspace lives. 

In a bunch of ways, there is no real percentage in remembering what things were actually like during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond all the uncertainty and suffering and death, there is just not a lot to hang your hat on. It was, in the manner of every single thing befouled by Donald Trump's sticky palm prints, very manifestly going to be made worse and more damaging for all that nasty attention, and was in fact made much worse and more damaging for it. From one moment to the next, it was brutally or just banally bad, the latest and worst in a long line of collective national traumas that was fractured, in classic American fashion, into a wilderness of atomized and alienated and terribly isolated instances of individuated suffering. It was also, in every moment, just so obviously and crushingly a colossal and humiliating waste. There is, for those who have made it to the other side of it, the blank satisfaction of having done so, and memories of some hopeful and uncertain eruptions of solidarity during it and the tentative return to everyday life in the long and unfinished after. But for those who remember what it was actually like and how it actually went, about all you've got is that alongside a great deal of sadness over the lives lost and the brighter possibilities that have gone so determinedly unrealized in their wake. You don't need me to tell you that it sucked, and that the damage it has done to our culture and politics is grievous and ongoing. It is in every way the sort of experience you would be anxious to see shrinking away in the rearview mirror, and then ideally not see at all. There is a less mournful and more active way to think and feel and be about all this, as it happens. It is demeaning, stupid, and wrong, but also impressively modular. Where actually remembering this particular bit of extremely recent history is an endlessly revolving locked groove of recrimination and grief, the Choose Your Own Adventure approach favored by a large and growing segment of the American populace—and the current leadership of the federal government's public health agencies, and virtually all national Republican elected officials, and an exhaustingly heterodox tranche of media types—is positively sprawling. What this approach lacks in coherence it more than makes up for in options. In place of what actually happened can be more or less whatever you want, or just want to be upset about. The familiar and dispiriting and already plenty infuriating herky-jerk realities of public health policy conceived and executed under pressure is replaced not with one singular sprawling conspiracy but an endless algorithmic scroll of Intriguing Questions.

All Gianni Infantino needed was patience. Memory for scandal is short, even in a sport as massive as soccer, and whatever controversies the FIFA president willingly courted during the 2026 World Cup would have soon faded into the background as he won what was going to be an unopposed re-election next March. He could have ridden off into the sunset in 2031 and made millions off the connections built during his tenure at the head of FIFA. That wasn't enough for him, though, and so now the walls are instead closing in, a self-inflicted error caused by greed and a plan to turn the World Cup into a private equity playground. The post-tournament afterglow was short, and Infantino faces opposition from most (but, crucially, not all) corners of the soccer world, his ending looming on a quickly approaching horizon. UEFA's threat to boycott the World Cup if Infantino went ahead with his investor sell-off was the first domino in a process that ended with Infantino retracting the proposal himself. Since then, it was only a matter of time before the question became what sort of fallout would be in store for Infantino due to his enormous failure. It wasn't surprising that the gears of his potential ousting began turning in Europe once more. First, UEFA responded to Infantino's retraction by saying its leaders had "lost confidence" in him. That phrase served as both a statement of UEFA's enduring disapproval and a further threat, hinting at the possibility of a formal vote of no confidence, which would be the first step in ejecting Infantino from FIFA. Soccer's national and continental associations then followed suit. Wales first made that move on Wednesday, withdrawing its letter of support for Infantino's re-election. England's Football Association soon followed, and the ball kept on rolling from there. Serbia, Sweden, and Finland (which first broached the topic last week) have all officially withdrawn their support. The message, at least from certain parts of the soccer world, is clear: Infantino must go. Infantino isn't on an island all alone, however. His work in courting smaller associations around the world has built for him a base of support that has held up even in this period of blunder. As of now, Infantino has reportedly received reiterations of support from about 15 nations, including Qatar and Morocco, two World Cup hosts (the former hosted in 2022, and the latter will be one of the co-hosts in 2030). Egypt, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Kuwait round out the group of seven nations that have already gone public with their support, with eight others reportedly doing so in private. The big domino yet to fall in either direction is Saudi Arabia, which will host the 2034 World Cup. The awarding of that tournament to Saudi Arabia was one of the bigger controversies of Infantino's tenure.