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DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history.  Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the roughest type of fucking animals you could ever deal with,” because of their Sam Maguire Cup-or-bust standard. The star-laden squad relies most on David Clifford, a three-time player of the year and the only player of his generation that comes up in GOAT conversations.  All of Ireland expects Mayo to lose.

Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshuffled Eastern Conference. Can't say I understand it on any level: narrative, on-court, commercial, or otherwise. Perhaps it has something to with James's long-standing belief in cumulative star talent rather than a specific mesh of skillsets; remember when he thought Russell Westbrook would work well alongside him? Perhaps he's sympathetic to Jaylen Brown, and is picking up a sword in the anti-"analytics" battle for the game's soul. But this is certainly not his best route to winning a fifth title. His most talented teammate, Joel Embiid, played 38 games in the last regular season. Maybe James was really enamored with one or two of his performances in last season's playoffs, but there are more medically sound bets to make when it comes to a late-career title hunt. Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe are spry young guards, and they'll be a delight with James in transition, but neither is the sort of knockdown off-ball shooter that optimizes James in the halfcourt. I look forward to the facial expressions he'll make the first time a Brown iso fritters away the end of a close game. The Sixers' starting lineup will leave lots of weak points for opposing offenses to attack—do not tell me that 32-year-old Embiid will be anchoring a championship defense. Again, there's a lot of talent on this roster; I just have no idea how it will all fit together. That's Nick Nurse's job, if he can keep it.

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed, the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams. You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support. You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams. Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff, like winning some intermediate sprints, wearing one of the jerseys for a day or two, or simply being visible. Variety is one part of what makes the Tour's competitive landscape so well-tended; the other is scarcity. While every team will enter the race with different goals, there's not enough to go around. The fun part is seeing which prizes each team pursues, who that puts them in conflict or alliance with, and how their plans are forced to evolve over the three weeks of racing. What does a successful Tour look like? Every team has a different answer. EF is the perfect team through which to understand how complicated and intriguing this all is. Unlike UAE or Visma, EF wasn't going to target the yellow jersey. But they're also stronger than the bottom-feeders, and as such have larger ambitions than merely notable participation. For example, Lotto has had a good Tour despite having only won some combativity awards, simply because they keep putting riders in doomed breakaways and having them hold on longer than chasing teams expect. Last year, EF had a dream Tour, with Ben Healy taking a stage win, finishing 10th overall, spending some time in the yellow jersey, and winning the overall combativity prize. This time around, Healy didn't come into the Tour fully healthy, and though EF had superstar rider Richard Carapaz back, he was also recovering from surgery and couldn't realistically target another Tour podium. So it was time to win some stages.

Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003

My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of his fingers, as if she is breakable and precious. The bodies embrace haphazardly, but the hands are patient and deliberate. The lovers were modeled after the adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But I could never feel anything doomed or sinful about the pair. All I saw was the tension between the hesitancy and the urgency of a first kiss—the feeling of fear and desire all wrapped up in one.  The Kiss was my first introduction to the works of Rodin. From then on, I became fascinated by the stone figures Rodin seemed to capture in motion, as well as the depths of feeling he built from the subtle details of the body. My first summer in Philadelphia, I spent many afternoons journeying to the Rodin Museum, sitting in the sculpture garden or wandering the small rooms to take in the subtleties. Just like with The Kiss, my eyes are always drawn to the hands.  Writing on his weeks spent observing Rodin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

Jimothy crept into our lives like any good cryptid—as a blurry, scuttling thing. Kiana Hall, the Seattle local whose firsthand footage resulted in Jimothy's newfound fame, first thought she had spotted a cat running under a car. But upon closer inspection, the creature was no feline. "I was seeing some kind of gray, fluffy creature that was shaped sort of like an orb with really long legs," Hall said in an interview with Reuters. Hall's vertical video captures the creature, which she christened Jimothy, scampering enigmatically across a desiccated lawn. Although the animal's coat and black mask identifies them clearly as a raccoon, Jimothy is undeniably orb-shaped, as if a planet suddenly sprouted a cluster of legs so that it might prance about to unsettle and delight Seattleites lucky enough to glimpse them. The raccoon has since become unofficially canonized as a local saint, inspiring various effigies in the media of mural, mathematics, medieval marginalia, and even a Mariners in-game cameo. Although Jimothy's adoring fans use he/him for the raccoon, Jimothy's sex is unknown. "If a video emerges where Jimothy is standing on his (or her!) hind legs and facing forward, then we might be able to determine Jimothy's sex," Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email. So until we are fortunate to be flashed by Jimothy, we're all just guessing. The reason behind Jimothy's distinct shape, however, is more decipherable. When Kent Morton, a veterinarian at Compassionate Care Animal Hospital in Michigan who co-hosts the podcast Vet Med For Idiots By Idiots, first saw images of Jimothy, he felt he could diagnose the raccoon. Jimothy appears to have a congenital issue called short spine syndrome. "The soft tissues in the spine will fuse the vertebrae, and that's what gives them the short neck appearance," Morton said. "It's a very distinctive condition."

I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent. Yeah, that guy. He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah. Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man is subject to quarterly declarations of a loneliness epidemic and, in a fun new twist, mandatory testosterone tests, there's basically nobody better suited to probe the hollow inner workings of modern masculinity than McBride. He’s had a lot of practice, after all. As a screenwriter and performer, he’s demonstrated a particular genius for understanding the Dumb Guy in a way that only a really smart one can. That McBride can write is not in dispute, but I’m not sure what, exactly, to make of this book or his intentions behind it.  The difficulty I found in reading and responding to Thrilling Tales is that Danny McBride, as a concept, already exists in our collective societal brain. (If you're looking for the obligatory Kenny Powers mention, it’s already over.) This isn’t a fame issue, though. Celebrities turning to fiction may be a fun recent micro-trend which the publishing industry is using to provide something of a higher audience baseline, but it is historically a pretty normal endeavor. David Duchovny cranked out Bucky F*cking Dent in 2016, and Carrie Fisher gifted us Postcards From the Edge three decades before that, and somewhere in the middle Hugh Laurie wrote The Gun Seller, or rather, as his most devout readers know it, Tout Est Sous Contrôle. No, the circle I struggled to square is that this is a book that, in many instances, feels like it was written by somebody with clear talent who recognized that writing a book is simply a thing they can do. It’s not laziness, to be clear: The stories here do not read like recycled character sketches from a writer’s room scratch pad. You can hear in McBride's book press tour that he wanted these short stories to exist as short stories. 

Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling novelist Paul Tremblay, author of the new Dead But Dreaming Of Electric Sheep, onto the show this week. The idea was that, with no top-of-the-news sports to talk about, we could talk about basically anything. And so we did. The episode begins with talk about Paul's prostate cancer experience, complete with thematically appropriate Dreamcatcher comps, an arachnid surgical robot, and a surgeon no-selling his pre-operation attempt at a joke. It is a good deal funnier than it had any right to be, even before the phrase "penile rehab" was spoken aloud. We also spoke about his experience getting roasted by teenagers while continuing to teach high school math after authoring several bestselling horror novels, what it's like to sue OpenAI, and what his own lengthy deposition in that case revealed about big AI's legal strategy and effectively nonexistent capacity to read a room. We also discussed his new book, invented a verb form of Weekend At Bernie's, and talked about the thrills and relatively mild indignities of the contemporary book tour.

There's a Massachusetts–based restaurant chain that offers a free kids meal—kid must be present, limit two per party—the day after a Boston Red Sox win. When the team was scuffling at the bottom of the AL East and manager Alex Cora was fired for a dismal start, the promotion became an easy joke: The children of New England were hungry. So hungry. Offensive struggles and one-run losses had turned them into the wee ragamuffins of Oliver Twist. But around the end of June, after dropping two of three to the lowly Colorado Rockies, something changed: The Red Sox began providing meals. They swept the New York Yankees in a four-game series in Boston, the finale an invigorating win courtesy of Jarren Duran's walk-off hit, then added one more victory against the Washington Nationals for a nice little five-game streak. They did drop two games to the Nats, one in which Cade Cavalli was a little racist, but from that point on, the Red Sox didn't lose. From July 3 to the night of July 22 (including the all-star break), Boston won 15 straight, improving their record from 37-48 to 52-48 and putting themselves firmly within the wild card race. The streak tied a franchise record last accomplished in 1946, back when Ted Williams was having an MVP season. For the majority of this month, the children of New England have feasted on cheesy flatbreads and chicken tenders—perhaps even a fried shrimp for the more adventurous eaters. They've gone Augustus Gloop mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOkpaVgs248

LIV Golf's honchos, the poor suckers, are still out there scrambling around, looking for investors to keep their dipshit tour afloat after the Saudi Public Investment Fund suddenly booted them into the wilderness back in April. Now that LIV Golf has lost its utility as a sportswashing spectacle and as a wedge for market disruption, it is left with zero authentic value whatsoever. Nobody was clamoring for more golf, for golf with stupid team names, or for much noisier golf. A formerly endlessly resourced and attention-bloated LIV Golf couldn't bring the PGA Tour to its knees and thus force a merger, and now it is left to make an argument for itself, an argument that became comical the moment the tour was declared a dud by the most brazen and profligate entity in world sports. If the ROI on LIV is too lousy for the PIF, buddy, they are simply FUBAR, and possibly SOL. Things are spiraling. LIV Golf was recently sued by one of its vendors, a Canadian technology company called Mobii Systems Group (the full complaint can be read at the bottom of this post). Mobii and LIV Golf signed a contract in January 2025 for the former to provide "integrated broadcast technology, streaming services, platform licenses, and related support services at all LIV Golf events in 2025 and 2026." In the complaint, filed July 17 in Florida, Mobii says that LIV Golf has been falling behind on invoices for services rendered, to the tune of approximately $925,000, and in late May attempted to squirrel out from under the remainder of the deal, covering the last handful of 2026 events. The complaint says that Mobii's "infrastructure, personnel, platform licenses, and cloud services" were built, tuned, and sized for the LIV Golf engagement, and that they are thus eating a huge loss of revenue, offset basically not at all by the sudden unexpected opening of their schedule. That plus the huge bill for unpaid invoices, says the complaint, adds up to over $1 million in damages. There is at least one grimly funny highlight from the mass of exhibits attached to Mobii's complaint: In a letter from May sent to LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil, Mobii CEO Greg Schultz describes getting a runaround from LIV's accounting department that will be familiar to anyone who has ever accidentally fielded a phone call from someone to whom they owe money: