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I know how the faint praise goes, but a lot of the important things Angel Reese does actually do show up in the box score. They certainly did in Atlanta’s Game 2 win over New York on Wednesday, a 101-98 overtime thriller that gave the Dream a 2-0 lead in the semifinals. This showed up in the box score:

Why does anyone play fantasy football? This is not a trick question, although it's also not particularly difficult to answer. Perhaps they do it for money, or they enjoy football, or they want a shared activity to help stay in touch with friends or family. Whatever the reason, the fun is in picking your guys and managing your little team and hoping you win more often than you lose. Some people have a healthier relationship to this endeavor than others. Still, if none of it appeals to you, then you can always not do it. Then there's this guy:

Names, the heroine of Cynthia Buchanan’s 1972 debut novel, Maiden, thinks to herself, “are so vital.” And with a name like Fortune, you’d have to try your luck in California. Although she prefers Fortunée: she calls this a “higher-type pronunciation,” though this also marks it as a maiden name. She’s never gotten lucky. At 30, Fortune is still a virgin, “and her virginity had burrowed in.” “Would life forget about her?” runs her inner monologue, “Overlook her? Pass her by? Misdial? Anxiety became a lifestyle.” Perhaps, as Fortune later comes to believe, names are “not all they’re cracked up to be.” In the tour-de-force of an opening chapter, Fortune emerges as a post-modern pastiche of a girl; we know little about her background, other than that she’s poorly educated, from somewhere in the South, and has a brother and a small handful of romantic disappointments whose impact she tries to suppress. She’s papered over the void of her virginity and her background like a teenager decorating a bedroom wall. She is a woman putting herself together from the spare parts of mass culture, a collage of magazine clippings, ’50s movie stars, and dating how-to guides, trying to form herself into someone a man might want—and the book itself is composed of, among other things, an advertisement for a dating service, a reality show audition transcript, court documents, and personal ads. It’s an allegory for America, its manufactured, impossible dreams, its naivete and excess, its delusional self-mythologizing.  On publication, the New York Times grouped Maiden with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays, calling the three "a natural trilogy," and going so far as to suggest that Maiden might be "the best of the three." The novel’s precise, time-stamped detail may explain why it faded from view while Play It as It Lays and The Bell Jar became modern classics (though all three feature some attitudes and language that now reads as offensively outdated). But Maiden’s specific concerns are also what make it feel, if not exactly timely, like a premonition or a warning. “Language,” for instance, “haunted [Fortune]. The advertised word … the ‘you’ in advertising, the impossible ‘you’ spoke to her.” Fortune is, like many a chick-lit heroine, constantly in search of a job and a boyfriend, but Buchanan is keenly aware of the lonely logic of commodification that links her two pursuits. Now being reissued by Hagfish, and read in a contemporary context, Maiden looks just as much like a funhouse mirror for our own times as it is an artifact of its own, presaging the dating apps, the endless scroll, the conspicuous consumption and pastiched personalities of our era, as it does a reflection of its own.

You might have heard by now of the scientist in Russia, 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, who died on Oct. 2 of an unknown illness. Shipilova worked in a lab at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, an institution founded in the 1930s to control and prevent—you guessed it—plagues. Russian health authorities have since quarantined the hospital where Shipilova died, along with staff at the institute and anyone else who came in contact with her. These are the facts. And then there are the murkier details, as well as the rumors. Shipilova was diagnosed with a pneumonia of unknown origin, per Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian public health agency. A governor of a neighboring republic said Shipilova died "possibly from the plague" and a Russian journalist wrote on his Telegram that Shipilova had broken a test tube before she got sick, reported Science. There are reports of a second worker at the institute who contracted pneumonia, per the AP, and reports that several hospitals have been placed under quarantine, per NPR. Although the Russian government announced that "test results showed no presence of dangerous infectious disease pathogens in any of the contacts," the head of Rospotrebnadzor traveled to Irkutsk to meet with the regional anti-epidemic commission, CNN reported. The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, meanwhile, has not responded to journalists' questions. Many of this journalist's questions—such as "Is there a plague happening in Russia?" and "Should I be freaking out?"—don't have clear answers. But before your mind fills with images of eerily avian plague doctors, these are the questions we can answer, at least for now.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. You might have heard there’s an election coming soon. Given that this is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, No. 536, the campaign industrial complex has rested a 1,000-pound boulder atop the SPAM button in an attempt to curry favor with you, the voter. This is why I, a Marylander, am bombarded with campaign ads/flyers/robocalls 48 hours a day, including TV ads for Senate candidates in states nowhere near mine, Ohio and Texas in particular. It’s also why Donald Trump has used taxpayer money to buy up national airtime for an ad that features him walking menacingly toward the camera, like you’re about to be his next victim. Thank you, Mister President! You’ll notice that much of this long-distance haranguing is being waged by the Republican Party, almost certainly because their current polling nationwide is abysmal. If those numbers hold—although you and I know better than to trust polls—the GOP stands on the brink of losing both houses of Congress, plus a number of crucial state elections. That’s why they’re flooding the airwaves with a steady stream of dogshit. These are tactics of desperation.

Not a lot of owners would have let Mike Elias do what he has done with the Baltimore Orioles. This was true in a negative, how-dare-you-sir sense when the team's John Angelos–led ownership entrusted Elias with overseeing a more strategic approach to bottoming all the way out, following a 115-loss 2018 season in which then-GM Dan Duquette traded away every veteran he could before being fired that November. Those deals netted 15 players; of those, only Dean Kremer would go on to contribute positively to a good Orioles team. Much of that is on Duquette, but also a great deal of time elapsed in there. Baltimore's first playoff appearance of the Elias era didn't arrive until 2023. That was when the best of the prospects he had selected, with the high draft picks that were the reward of those spectacularly abject seasons, came together as the core of a team that won the American League East before meekly bowing out of the postseason in three games. It was easier to see the vision when the Orioles ran a $60 million payroll and won 101 games that year than it was during the half-decade that the team spent splashing around in the toilet, but Elias made sure to emphasize, in the good years and the bad, and in the brisk way that baseball executives emphasize this sort of thing, that the vision was indeed there. During the most fragrant of the toilet years, Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson were still abstract and dreamy around the edges in the ways that even the best prospects are; by 2023, both had arrived as big-league stars on a team that looked like it would go on to win a lot of games. Even at what now looks like that team's comparatively middling peak, there was the sense that Elias's personal vision of how the team should be run was still being prioritized over the urgency of the moment. That he was able to get away with that surely owed something to how unsettled the team's ownership situation was, and to how little he asked of those owners beyond their patience and faith. The Angelos family improvised several seasons of Succession in public before selling the team to private equity billionaire David Rubenstein in January 2024. A baseball executive's livelihood is dependent on their skills at managing up, and Elias has never wavered in projecting the sort of cocksure executive mastery that pleases the extremely rich. It has to all appearances worked quite well on both sets of bosses.

The Tampa Bay Rays–New York Yankees ALDS matchup revealed some intriguing eccentricities of each team's respective ballpark. For example, the Tropicana Field ground rules contain a section entitled "Catwalks, Lights and Suspended Objects" with particulars on if a ball should strike the 'C-Ring' or 'D-Ring' or "any of the angled support rods that connect the 'C-Ring' to the masts that support the 'D-Ring'" in fair territory, versus those if a ball should strike the 'A-Ring' or 'B-Ring' and so forth and so on. The Yankees ran into this rule in Game 2 of the series, when Spencer Jones hit a ball that struck the B-Ring, and was caught for an out. With the series 2-0 in the Rays' favor, the games moved to New York, where last night, both teams ran into one of the particular hazards of Yankee Stadium: There are lots of Yankees fans in there. In the bottom of the sixth inning, with the Yankees down 4-2 and facing elimination, Anthony Volpe came up to bat against Rays pitcher Griffin Jax. Yankees fans have an extremely up-and-down-but-mostly-down relationship with Volpe, and this was his opportunity to redeem himself. Volpe pulled an 1-0 sinker inside that carried well for what looked like a home run to tie the ballgame. A hero! Or so it only seemed! While the call on the field was a home run, the umpires initiated a replay review, and a definitive side angle showed that a fan in the stands had extended far over the barrier to provide a sort of trampoline for the ball to bounce across. It remains unclear exactly where the ball might have landed had the fan not reached his hands out; perhaps it would have, miracle of all miracles, struck the top of the ledge and bounced over anyway, who knows? But the umpires, alas, ruled for spectator interference, though they also said that Rays left fielder Victor Mesa Jr. would not have caught the ball, demoting Volpe's home run to an RBI double. The Yankees were within one run of the Rays, but that was as close as they would get.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. For the longest time, I complained that rap music wasn't getting the Hollywood documentary treatment it deserved. While I've enjoyed experimental, in-depth docs for the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and of course, Bob Dylan, I felt that this kind of serious, prestigious treatment should've been given to our best rappers. For the most part, over the last couple years, we've started getting that: an astounding docuseries on 2pac and Afeni Shakur; a documentary on the Notorious B.I.G., using home video footage never seen before; an extensive, long-gestating documentary of Kanye throughout his descent into madness; and now an eight-part series about Jay-Z on HBO, shot by Bradford fuckin' Young. And you know what, I'm still complaining. https://youtu.be/xEMniH7jzs4?si=EVIJ-9yj1DZ9-ZAi

Marc Edelman has spent much of the last two decades fighting to help college athletes get fairly compensated for their labor. A lawyer who is currently a tenured professor at Baruch College, Edelman has been writing about the NCAA's violations of antitrust law since 2002. In 2023, he advised both the states of Ohio and New York in their antitrust cases against the NCAA. As an antitrust expert who has dedicated so much time to thinking about college sports and how athletes should be properly compensated, Edelman felt like the perfect guy to talk to about the Protect College Sports Act, which was recently passed by the Senate and is expected to be voted on in the House after the midterm elections. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

We are zooming ahead to the very end of Wednesday night's semifinal game between the New York Liberty and Atlanta Dream, which the Dream won in overtime, 101-98, to take a 2-0 series lead. After Angel Reese hit two free throws to put the Dream up by three, the Liberty had one more chance to engineer a potential game-tying shot with four seconds to play. This is what they came up with: https://youtu.be/N2StGRISYLY?t=730 An astute observer may notice the little orange tick under the words "New York" on ESPN's box score. That represents the Liberty's remaining reset timeout, which allows a team to advance the ball to halfcourt, but does not allow them to huddle and draw up a play. The reset timeout was put into the WNBA rulebook for this very situation—coaches are meant to save them for moments like these, so as to prevent close games from ending on totally hopeless possessions in which the trailing team has very little chance of even getting a shot at the rim. Liberty head coach Chris DeMarco did not call his reset timeout, though, leaving his players to struggle through a hopeless final possession in which Breanna Stewart's shot did not even touch the rim.