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It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. The story of the past decade of American soccer has been the eastward migration of the nation's best young players out of MLS purgatory and into the best teams and developmental academies in the world. That story is supposed to have a happy ending for the national team, or at least some positive plot developments. So far it has not, though the Jürgen Klinsmann prophecy has yet to be really tested. That's what's at stake in this 2026 World Cup: a resolution. One moment, one goal, one game goes your way, and everything is different. This is the competition that matters.

I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms concept, born from a 4chan thread imagining an endless series of drab and empty yellow-tinted rooms that look like abandoned ’90s conference halls. Sometimes otherworldly beings dwell in these places, where furniture and walls meld together in awkward, nonsensical angles. Other times, you are simply trapped in an ever-expanding liminal space that has no end or exit. Parsons expanded on this idea by creating entirely computer-generated yet photoreal videos documenting the Backrooms. Soon his version, with an increasingly intricate and developing lore involving top secret government programs, took off on its own. With the release of his first feature film, Backrooms, produced by A24, I tried to remember why I was served Parsons' video at all. Creepypasta content was never my forte, though I did follow a few filmmakers committed to showcasing their work on YouTube, notably Adam Butcher, who made one of my favorite short horror films, Internet Story. Throw in a few longform YouTube essays I watched in high school about "unexplained events" and perhaps this is how I wound up following Parsons' over the years.The reason this is of any interest now is because a small but growing cadre of Youtubers-turned-feature-horror-directors have drawn media and box office attention: Danny and Michael Philippou, who directed 2022's Talk To Me and 2025's Bring Her Back; Chris Stuckmann with 2025's Shelby Oaks; Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, with this year's Iron Lung; Curry Barker's recent film Obsession; and now Parsons with Backrooms. That this group of young men began their careers online has been the source of both suspicion and hyperbolic praise, signaling either admirable scrappiness and ingenuity or barrel-scraping trend-chasing on the parts of their producing partners. What is true for each of these directors is the fact that they had little to no familiarity with traditional filmmaking techniques or studio involvement. For those like Fischbach, whose long, frenetic tenure online has seen him work on a diverse (though not necessarily formally or narratively rigorous) range of projects, an outsider's ethos results in a compelling, authentically strange, and unique passion project.  For pretty much everyone else, one finds derivative filmmaking aping certain cinematic aesthetics—notably the locked-camera, low-lit, slow-zoom, jarring and shrill horror of Ari Aster—without any real understanding as to how or why these elements work. These films appear sleek and professional with sharp digital photography, symmetrical framing, and devoted performers. But there is no real grasp of cinematic language, no instinct or learned skill for blocking or staging, and no narrative sophistication, to say nothing of the dialogue, which tends toward the overly expository and literal. The horror is derived from sudden loud sounds, abrupt cuts to a shocking image, the juxtaposition of upbeat music and disturbing imagery, and, without fail, someone's head being smashed to a bloody pulp. This is a cinema of non sequiturs and vacuous, sometimes nonexistent, interiority. As critic Esther Rosenfield wrote in an essay about Iron Lung, “None of the skills required to make viral video content carry over to the art of filmmaking.” Refreshingly, Parsons’ visual concerns in Backrooms are mostly about space and the perception of depth, and the patient discovery of how the two can combine to create discomfort. Instead of dark environments where the viewer has to squint to see what’s hiding in the corner, there are brightly lit, garish corridors that dwarf their inhabitants, spaces that cut into each other creating frames with frames. That said, Backrooms is odd for several reasons, not least of which is its clear struggle to turn a series of interconnected videos in which people are the least interesting aspect into something resembling a self-contained movie that places two characters at its narrative center. Set in the 1990s, Backrooms revolves around Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an emotionally volatile furniture store owner, whose therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), is unsure how best to help him through his feelings of resentment. In Clark, Ejiofor is given the chance to embody a broken, stubborn, and lonely man thwarted in his attempts at projecting authority and masculinity. Parsons demonstrates real confidence in the scenes between Clark and Mary, allowing both actors to enhance often stilted dialogue through expression and body language. 

Let this completely neutral observer start by saying it would have been more appropriate if UCLA had won this game. Nothing against Dave McKenna's beloved Texas Tech; the Bruins just had the coolest highlight. Sunday night's Women's College World Series clash between these two programs was an elimination game where the winner would go on to the semis and the loser would be banished from Oklahoma City. New-money Texas Tech is a target for the anger of opposing programs (jealous ones, arguably) for the way they've aggressively pursued top transfers to put themselves on the map, and they were fighting for their lives after a gripping 2-1 extra innings loss to Tennessee the previous day. UCLA, a perennial participant in the WCWS, had bounced back from a Day 1 defeat against Alabama with an 11-0 KO of Arkansas. Both sides got their bats going early, with the score 3-2 Tech by the middle of the third. UCLA plated a run and loaded the bases in the bottom half, but Kaitlyn Terry, who transferred to Tech from the Bruins, entered in relief to get the last two outs and keep the score tied three-all. From there, Terry shut down her former team while the Red Raiders took a 6-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh and final inning. She got pulled, however, when Ramsey Suarez hit a leadoff dinger. NiJaree Canady returned to the mound, and she gave up a single before earning a strikeout and a fly out.

You'll ace our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Zachary Edward-Brown, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach is a Chicagoan who enjoys playing soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. He's always open to collabs. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

It didn't take very long for the people who sell baseball to us to sour the vibe of a season that is barely a third of the way along. What promises to be an excruciating negotiation (and occasionally a refusal to negotiate at all) over Major League Baseball's next collective bargaining agreement opened with the MLB Players Association making an initial proposal, and owners responding with a gobbledygook-intensive counter built around a salary cap. It was a sufficiently inauspicious beginning that five entire months of baseball will be played this year in the shadow of a likely lockout. This is earlier than we thought they'd be-turd the punchbowl, to be honest, but it's happening not because the owners want to get a jump on the process but so they can define the rest of your year with their bullshit; the rest of this baseball season would, after all, be much more interesting to people who care about baseball than it is to people that own it. Before we go too much further here, transparency demands that we tell you up front that the owners must lose this fight, and not just because they've lost all the others. They must lose because they are playing a longer and more dismal game, as outlined by The Athletic's Evan Drellich in a long but indisputably thorough look at what the owners actually want—which, if you don't mind the spoiler, is to jack up the sales prices of their franchises for when they get out entirely. Roster cost certainty, which is code for "we can't trust our own impulses, so we'll make the players do it for us," is cited as one of the primary reasons MLB owners think that franchise valuations—the big numbers assigned by Forbes, Sportico, and the like—have risen more rapidly in the salary-capped NFL and NBA than in their league. And while the values of teams in those other leagues really have appreciated in value more than MLB teams over the last decades, that has less to do with salary caps than it does with those leagues rich and growing media deals, all of which far outpace MLB's, as well as some other, even more elusive factors—new arenas funded by desperate cities with sweetheart deals attached, multiple players who qualify as must-see attractions, and in the case of the Golden State Warriors, who have gone from $450 million to $10.8 billion in 15 years, all of the above. Most MLB franchises are not a CBA tweak away from replicating any of that.

The New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals. The way the team's been playing lately, that means fans have only a little time to make a big decision: Are they gonna cheer or jeer when James Dolan holds up the Larry O’Brien Trophy? It’s been a long time since the Knicks have gotten this close to a ring. An awful long time, with an awful lot of awful teams. And Dolan, who has controlled day-to-day operations of the organization since the turn of the century, has been blamed for the last two-and-a-half decades of that awfulness. That means that John Madden's alleged description of winning as a "great deodorant” could soon be put to a test. Because few owners in sports have stunk like Dolan. There aren't enough pixels to retell everything Dolan did along the way to becoming an enemy of his own team’s fans. But any list of his ungreatest hits would include:  

Baseball is the only sport that regularly produces the following thought in my head: Does everyone who is good at baseball actually kind of suck at baseball? The existence of Shohei Ohtani makes it impossible to ever answer with a definitive "yes," but the question lingers still. Related to this matter is the plight of Fernando Tatis Jr. Not so long ago, he was a young Padres shortstop showing signs of becoming the best player in the league. He produced 6.7 bWAR across 143 games in his first two seasons, and then broke out in year three with 42 homers, a .975 OPS, and 6.6 bWAR. But then, oops, he got suspended for taking PEDs and missed the entirety of the 2022 season. Since then, he's remained a highly productive if slightly less powerful player in the seasons. He hasn't hit more than 25 homers in a season since his suspension, but he played 155 games last year and finished with 6.1 bWAR. Twenty-five homers is significantly fewer than 42, but it is also not a small enough number to have signaled that Tatis would start the 2026 MLB season swinging a damn noodle bat. Coming into Saturday's game against the Nationals, Tatis had gone 55 games without hitting a homer, and was in the midst of the longest homer-less streak (238 plate appearances) of any player in the league. That humiliating streak mercifully ended yesterday when he clobbered a pitch 451 feet into the left-field seats.

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I really loved attending games. Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Miami came at the old Dolphins/Marlins stadium, a truly horrible place to watch any sporting event, but also one that was a mere 10-minute drive from my home. I went to countless Marlins games in the summer of 2003, watching them slowly put things together into what would eventually be an improbable second World Series title that fall. (I was lucky enough to attend Game 5 of that World Series, back when tickets were merely expensive and not expensive.) Baseball's constant motion kept me grounded in the rudderless months of Miami summer, when the heat is so stifling that you could get tickets behind home plate for Sunday afternoon games for about $20. There's another reason that I loved baseball so much, though, and that is that I was in the exact right age demographic for the golden age of baseball video games. My late single-digit years and my early teens coinciding with the releases of such bangers like Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., Triple Play 2002, and the glorious trilogy of MVP Baseball 2003 through and especially 2005 brought together two of my great loves: sports and gaming. I remember spending a big part of a month in Venezuela one summer just playing Triple Play 2002 for days on end, only coming out for air to eat, and sometimes not even that. I also remember learning every single starting lineup and rotation in MVP Baseball 2004, while trying to keep my defending champion Marlins at the top of the league. I remember all of these things because they made me grow closer with the sport, and made me understand what I wanted to get out of being a baseball fan. Fast-forward a couple of years, and baseball video games fell off rather quickly, as did, and perhaps not coincidentally, my love of the game. Part of that is that the Marlins did what the Marlins do, and traded away Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis and a bunch of other stalwarts from the 2003 World Series team, but I also went off to college in 2007 and had other things on my mind. I've tried since then; I briefly got into the MLB 2K series before that went kaput, and once I made the swap from Xbox to PlayStation, one of my first purchases was whatever year of MLB The Show was out then (14, if memory serves). I did love the latter, but it never held my attention quite like the games of my teen years did.

Viewed strictly within the context of the Western Conference Finals, there was nothing all that shocking about the San Antonio Spurs' 111-103 road victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 7. That doesn't make what happened on Saturday night feel any less destabilizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bOMYQFgK4I Consider everything that went wrong for the Thunder throughout this series. Injuries to Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell reduced their all-important depth and left Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with very little support in the offensive backcourt. Victor Wembanyama's mere presence gummed up their offense, leaving their turnover-generating defense and timely shooting from role players as their most reliable methods for producing points. Unless Wembanyama was playing like shit, the Thunder's chances for victory in every game this series were banished to the margins.

By their very nature, cup finals do not necessarily make for exciting matches. For every 2022 World Cup final, there are 15 2019 Champions League finals. That does not excuse what happened on Saturday in Budapest, though. Over 120 minutes, Arsenal forced Paris Saint-Germain into a torture rack of Mikel Arteta's creation, and the result was a tense and relatively even affair. Ah, who am I kidding? The result was a big ol' piece-of-crap match that was excruciating to watch, a perfect distillation of every critique I (and others) have had about Arsenal's style of play this season. Saturday's Champions League final did buck one trend, though, as Arsenal was not ultimately rewarded for its offensively defensive performance. PSG came back from an early and nearly match-killing 1-0 deficit to first even things up and then win in a penalty shootout. Oh, and don't worry: The penalty shootout was also terrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRnJRQmVMTg