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Vertical video makes Olivia Miles look good. Horizontal video makes her look better. Her gift shines in context, on the unadorned and unsoundtracked platform that is the next day's full-game replay. What the Minnesota Lynx rookie does best as starting point guard of the WNBA's top team is to understand every option available to her before choosing, inevitably, the right one. She's done well to earn the title "highlight reel player," but watch her enough and realize she's special for being a "film room player," too. Perhaps that's why this was not something everyone saw coming: the instant stardom, the MVP talks, the Lynx's surprisingly torrid start as they wait for franchise player Napheesa Collier to return from an ankle injury. When Minnesota drafted Miles with the second overall pick in April, it was fair to be curious about the match. The team lost most of its frontcourt in free agency and has lately been at a size disadvantage in the playoffs. Young players haven't always endeared themselves to head coach Cheryl Reeve, either. Since the bright spot of Collier, taken sixth in 2019, the draft has been unkind to the Lynx. Diamond Miller, their most recent lottery pick before Miles, was traded to Dallas at the 2025 deadline after playing sparingly.  But about a quarter of the way into the season, with the Lynx sitting at 11-3, Reeve has only been effusive in her praise. "The rookie," as Reeve will call her, has quickly earned the head coach's trust, enough so that Reeve sometimes even lapses out of that third-person common noun and into the first-person plural: "The team needs us," she recalled telling Miles during a game they spent jawing with the referees too much. "We're the brains behind it." Maybe all signs that this partnership would go well were there on draft night, before Miles had ever put on a Lynx jersey, when Reeve offered reporters a lofty comp: "This is the first real point guard we've had since Lindsay Whalen."

LOS ANGELES — Just off the ninth green at Riviera Country Club, during the first day of this year’s U.S. Women’s Open, a familiar face popped up in the gallery: Owen Wilson. But as fans milled about this congested space where multiple greens, tee boxes, and the path to the practice range converge, few seemed to notice. “Love your work,” one fan told the star of The Royal Tenenbaums, Zoolander, and the golf-centric series Stick; Wilson graciously thanked the man. But that was about it. Most everyone had their eyes on someone else. They were there for Nelly Korda.

Nobody told me that becoming a fan of the Chicago White Sox meant that I would have to suffer humiliating losses! Wait. Actually, everybody told me that. But I didn't listen. I arrived at Yankee Stadium for the first game of the White Sox series full of optimism. Even if the star sluggers, Aaron Judge and Munetaka Murakami, were out injured, we were still getting a treat of a pitching match-up: Chicago's breakout potential Cy Young candidate Davis Martin, and New York's recently reconstructed ace Gerrit Cole. I expected a tight, low-scoring game that the White Sox would pull out because they were fun, and because they'd just handled both the Dodgers and the Braves last week. Instead, I hear they're still finding scraps of Martin's uniform scattered amid the abandoned french fries in the bleachers after the Yanks blasted Chicago 12-2. The Sox ace seemed his normal self in the top of the first, surrendered a solo home run to Spencer Jones in the second, and then in the third looked like he was pitching with a 50-pound weight on his back. He walked three guys as the Yanks scored four runs, and when Will Venable made the decision to bring Martin back out for the fourth, it was a free-for-all. Martin's final line was 3.1 innings with eight hits and nine earned runs, mercifully exiting the game only after Paul Goldschmidt banged one into left for his 382nd career dong.

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, Chris answers a question about how to help your child get good at things.

Major League Baseball will never get through a season without a Pride Night controversy. If that becomes the goal, then the only sure option is to eliminate the promotion altogether. That may not be the worst idea: The cowards and vampires who run the league and its teams don't deserve the simple goodwill that comes from saying "gesundheit" to a stranger on a bus, let alone the presumption of human decency that might otherwise belong to those who in sincere good faith open their doors to a marginalized group. All-devouring billionaire demigods are no more committed to dignity and equality in this context than in any other. The very moment they can get away with it, the very moment prevailing winds make it strategically advisable, MLB's owners will host Eat The Homeless Nights. On the other hand, think of a trans teen in San Francisco, who shows up on a Pride Night Friday in June to watch the lousy wayward Giants lose to the Chicago Cubs, with the expectation that for this one night they will be more surrounded than usual, and maybe more surrounded than ever, by friends, fellows, and allies. The event itself might be passive, square, carefully guarded from any genuine cultural engagement, but its simplest, easiest objectives—one night where "you're more likely to see other queer people, and maybe your friends who don't like baseball could be convinced that it would be a fun time," as described by our Lauren Theisen—don't have to stand up as a symbol, or function as a lever in a movement, in order to accomplish something meaningful for someone. For the queer spectator who shows up only for a good time (one who can escape social media, anyway), Pride Night really should hold up as an experience of feeling basically whole and basically welcomed at the ballpark. It's exhausting how reliably this gets yoinked into a matter of religious freedom and thus contorted into a battleground of the culture wars. It's relatively new, in the scheme of things, for Pride Night festivities to include alternate uniforms. The San Francisco Giants have been doing it since 2021, and Friday night they rolled out caps with rainbow-colored lettering on the front logo. The majority of Giants players wore these without any fuss. At least four, all of them pitchers, staged protests. Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker wore the hats but scrawled bible verses onto them in shiny silver. Sam Hentges refused to wear the hat altogether, and instead wore a standard black cap with orange lettering. Roupp and Hentges made sure to insist to reporters afterward that their actions were motivated not by hate but by a belief system that apparently precludes support for the dignity of gay people.

By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Final mattered not. Team policy is team policy. Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got it after a four-game losing streak in 2020. Peter DeBoer, who replaced him, got it after a win that came after a three-game losing streak, but it still counts because the win came in the team's final game that season. Bruce Cassidy got canned with eight games left after a three-game losing streak. And now Torts. No wonder the Knights have the reputation they have. In fairness, this might have been predetermined, that Tortorella, who lives in Florida, was called out of three years' quasi-retirement to replace Cassidy and didn't want to relocate to Nevada. Maybe McCrimmon told him ahead of time that this would be a temporary assignment, and sent him home with a lot of hoodies and tees and maybe even a souvenir skate sharpener for the grandkids. But Torts did say during the Finals run that he would like to coach in the NHL again, and the only open jobs are in noted hockey lunatic asylums in Edmonton and Toronto, and Tortorella would barely reach Christmas before pulling off his own head in a post-practice scrum and coating the gathered reporters in plasma. That's no way to go out, even for someone as polarizing as him.

If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note. Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try. This mindset scales all the way up to some of the most powerful people in human history, but it is the same all the way down. It amounts to the belief that only these particular wimpy pink goofs, each one the protagonist of reality, can be entrusted to run things, and that any problem can be solved by telling some underling to handle it, and also to the idea that such an order becomes a glorious and vindicating solution immediately after it is issued. Nothing that follows will ever be their fault. Provided you do not care about or pay attention to the world, this worldview absolutely rocks.

I haven't watched a single game of the World Cup yet. Not because I don't want to, but because the part of my brain reserved for paying attention to sports is still recovering from the NBA Finals. My wish for the New York Knicks to lose just enough to extend the series to a full seven games—I never know when to leave a party—did not come to pass. So it's only a matter of time before I learn who's playing in the tournament and let a vague sense of geopolitics guide me to the right plucky underdog.  For now, my relationship to the spectacle consists of the whiplash between horrible news of immigration shakedowns and World Cup Racial Harmony videos. I consume the latter greedily, sending them out to friends with a promptness you might expect from a newswire. Occasionally I behave like a one-person propaganda office for the concept of soccer-based multiculturalism. It is simply quite funny to watch a video titled something like "Spain National Team Arrives In Chattanooga, Tennessee." There is apparently no limit to the number of times I can enjoy clips of Korean fans binge-drinking alongside Mexican ones. A deli is just a deli until you hear "Can I get a chicken parm with vodka sauce?" in a London accent, and a thick New Jersey one coo "I'll make it beautiful for you" in response.

For one night, you could be forgiven if your failing eyes confused Pete Crow-Armstrong for the ghost of Hack Wilson stepping up to the plate at Wrigley Field. Actually, scratch that. Most nights, you could be forgiven for confusing Pete Crow-Armstrong with a ghost. Frankly, I’m not quite convinced that he isn’t, especially with some of the defensive gaffes he made earlier this season, where the ball seemed to slip through his fingers as if he was fighting to remain on the plane of the living. But I digress. Last night, PCA became the 13th player in Cubs history to complete a cycle, hitting a single, a double, a triple, and a homer in one game. But PCA only took four plate appearances to complete the achievement, and he did so in a way no other Cub has done before.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlEIBrbMgM

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 Graham Platner (ugh), the World Cup, imperfect movies, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm off to the beach next week. But we'll have a guest host manning the post to answer all of your Funbag questions while I'm out, so go ahead and email them here. Who will be our mystery writer? I do not know. Why? I cannot say. How? I do not know how to answer that. Let's move on. Your letters: