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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, Justin answers a question about how to handle the emotionally volatile school drop off process.

Three short weeks after he appeared to be on the cusp of assuming the presidency of Brazil and turbocharging the fascist revival movement started by his cadaverous father Jair, Flavio Bolsonaro is now a fugitive from the Brazilian justice system. Having been humiliated by an octogenarian in Brazil's presidential election, he was unable to gin up any support for an election theft, and was thus forced to choose between handing over his passport or scampering off to Miami like so many failed dictators before him. Bolsonaro will no longer get to see through his family's dream of evangelicizing Brazil and turning the full force of its military inwards. Instead, he will be browsing the aisles of Publix and begging a different, much stupider octogenarian for the scraps of his dwindling mercy. How did the younger Bolsonaro get here? His journey to Florida began with the collapse of the powerful bank, Banco Master, just over a year ago. That collapse resulted in the world learning about all the corrupt schemes the bank was doing, and also how intertwined it was with the Bolsonaro family. Incredibly, Flavio hitting up the now-jailed Banco Master owner for money to finance a Jim Caviezel–led biopic of his tubercular father is at the center of his corruption case. Flavio's best and perhaps only chance of avoiding jail time hinged on his family's ability to win Brazil's 2026 presidential election.

As the nation marked its 250th anniversary this summer, Donald Trump could not stop posting AI-generated images of himself alongside George Washington. In one, Trump and Washington ride horses through a bucolic landscape, the sun setting in the distance. In another, Trump saves Washington from falling off a cliff; this one is styled as a movie poster for a time-traveling buddy cop film. These are in addition to the very real images of Washington’s and Trump’s faces hanging side by side on massive banners outside the Department of Interior building. More than any others though, Trump posted images of him and George Washington in the proposed White House ballroom. There's one in which Trump holds rolled up architectural plans (in an already-completed ballroom) while pointing out some distant feature to George. In another they both stand in the ballroom staring directly at the camera; even from the front you can tell they’ve both adopted Trump’s signature ass-out posture. There are at least five different versions of this particular scene. Trump’s insistence on posting images of himself alongside George Washington offers the perfect distillation of how he thinks about history. For him, history is synonymous with celebrity—and there could be no higher honor for our historical VIPs to be feted in Trump’s glimmering new ballroom. Unwilling, for obvious reasons, to wait for history’s judgment, Trump uses AI to place himself alongside the past’s most famous figures. 

It has been a trying start to the season for the Philadelphia Flyers, who were a surprise playoff team last year with one of the league's youngest rosters. Their impact players are still basically all 25 and younger, so some growing pains were to be expected. But things started brutally on Day 1 and haven't gotten much better: at 3-7-4 they are last in the East, despite having played more games than anyone else. The young fellas are mostly getting their goals—Trevor Zegras, Matvei Michkov, and Porter Martone are top three on the team in points; Denver Barkey, in his first full season, is still scuffling a bit—but there's more to NHL success than scoring. That's the message head coach Rick Tocchet is trying to drill into his charges. Even a slightly better record in overtimes (0-4, only one of those reaching a shootout) would have the Flyers sitting a little prettier, but they are proving less than adept at protecting the puck. Yes, a scoring chance looks very appealing at 3-on-3, but the Flyers skaters are acting like they've forgetten that the puck can go the other way. Consider Tuesday night at home against Columbus. The Blue Jackets jumped out to a 3-0 lead, but Philly dominated the rest of regulation and roared back to tie the game with 11 seconds left. Then, in overtime, Michkov got stripped soon after entering the attacking zone, something that can't happen as the trailer. Cole Sillinger and Zach Werenski went the other way on the juiciest 2-on-0 you'll see see (until 30 seconds later), and only a nifty Dan Vladar stop kept the game alive.

You Can See Everything is the movie event of the fall. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary has proved to be a potent mixture of zeitgeisty cultural insight and its own discourse-generating machine about the value and nature of documentary filmmaking. The screenings have been sold out and everyone wants to discuss and argue about each scene in minute detail. It is a testament to the film that even given a three-hour runtime, basically every moment feels like it could be ripped out and discussed as though it were the skeleton key for the entire premise. But there is one particular scene that I can’t let go of, and that I really feel needs to be examined at length in order to unearth certain truths about the film and the participants involved. That is the scene in which Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’s partner and the father of her two children, shows hog. Obviously, I am not alone in wanting to discuss this scene, which occurs when Evans decides to shower in front of the filmmakers. It has inspired much conversation, including with Oppenheim himself, who confirmed that the scene was Billy’s idea and that he just did it in front of the cameras, no prodding or even discussion necessary beforehand. But this raises the obvious question: Why? What was the thought process here? And what does it say about Billy in general? We are only left to speculate and theorize. Please understand that this is purely for the sake of journalism.  Theory No. 1: Billy is proud of his penis and wants to show it off.

Given that we’re all being filmed and filming ourselves all the time, how can it be exploitative to put someone on camera? The two movies this fall directed by Lance Oppenheim, Primetime and You Can See Everything (which he co-directed with Nathan Fielder), explore voluntary surveillance and the ethics of non-fiction. Together, they share an interest in the violence and vulnerability of seeing and being seen in a sickly recursive popular culture. Oppenheim was precocious: His first feature-length film, Some Kind of Heaven, with an executive-producer credit from Darren Aronofsky, premiered at Sundance on January 26, 2020, Oppenheim’s 24th birthday. He was fresh out of Harvard, where he studied under the film diarist Ross McElwee. At a time when consumers were buying new, smaller cameras and making home movies, McElwee turned his life into a sprawling documentary project, interweaving personal milestones with larger social concerns across, such as his masterpiece, the 1985 New South dating odyssey Sherman’s March, and 1993’s Time Indefinite, about the death of his father and the birth of his son. By the time Oppenheim met him, McElwee was at work on Remake, his most recent film, which draws from his many hours of footage of his son from his birth to his tragic early death, and in which McElwee expresses remorse over casting his family as characters that he misinterpreted. In one way or another, Oppenheim’s films also live with the consequences of throwing people into the spotlight. The feature-length documentaries he made in his 20s, Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and the three-part HBO series Ren Faire, were about aging and loneliness: retirees in The Villages, a sprawling community in Florida, spending their golden years indulging in precarious hedonism; compulsive sperm donors; the Lear-like elderly “king” of a Texas Renaissance Faire, and the children and employees vying to inherit it, should he ever step down. Oppenheim’s subjects are all, in one way or another, clinging on, but they’re fully integrated into a uniquely heightened aesthetic scheme. Intense conversations occur in tight, frame-filling closeups, under stylized lighting and with faces tinted in aggressive color grading that strains against accepted notions of verisimilitude, as if these people are offering up their lives to the camera and losing control of the narrative. Shot-reverse shot setups suggest the conventional camera coverage and editing rhythms of a narrative film; no moment of these characters’ lives is so abject that it isn’t being filmed with an audience in mind.

Connor Hellebuyck was in purgatory, and now he's living it up in Hell. It sounds like he preferred both to Winnipeg. After 11 seasons with the Jets, the three-time Vezina-winning goalie played his first game for another NHL team, earning a win for the New Jersey Devils in Dallas on Tuesday night. Hellebuyck got to the States by forcing his way out of Manitoba, and the 33-year-old's status as the President's favorite player, a playoff choker, and a possible tender-in-decline as he comes off his worst season since the beginning of his career all serve to temper the excitement of his move to Jersey. But goalie was a hole that the Devils desperately needed filled, and the modest package they sent in return—basically the 20-goal scorer Dawson Mercer and the kid they drafted 12th overall this year, Alexander Command—means they should be a better team right away. The pressure is certainly on Jersey to show some real improvement. After a promising first-round playoff win over the Rangers in 2023—their first series win since advancing to the Stanley Cup Final in 2012—a mix of injuries and plateaued youngsters have kept the Devils from making any real noise. It was supposed to be a new era for Jersey when Jack Hughes and his fellow kids broke out, but so far the team's most important players have yet to prove they can lead a contender. However, there are reasons to be optimistic about their depth, if not their top-end talent. Raiding Nashville for the all-around solid Luke Evangelista, who's still got a high ceiling at just 24, was perhaps my favorite move of the offseason, while another winger, rookie Amadeus Lombardi, is one of my top newcomers to watch for reasons that are only about 80 percent related to his name. (His siblings are Symphony and Ulysses, by the way.) The most glaring weakness has been in goal, with Jacob Markström failing to be the answer in the last two seasons. So the buyck stops here.

The NFL trade deadline is two weeks from now, but Indianapolis Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon has no interest in waiting that long to blow up her team. At some point during her team’s loss in Minnesota on Sunday, Irsay-Gordon probably wrote “Fuck this” into her notebook, and WHOA HEY. There goes longtime general manager Chris Ballard out the door, followed shortly thereafter by perennial All-Pro guard Quenton Nelson (to Seattle for a 2027 third-rounder and 2028 fifth-rounder), followed immediately by DT DeForest Buckner (to San Francisco for a 2027 fourth-round pick). Suddenly we got ourselves a big ol’ trade party! Which other Colts will get uprooted, and will other middling franchises will now commence fire sales of their own? Folks, Arif and I revel in all of those possibilities on this week’s episode of All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/d2c042fd-ed58-4bf5-8afe-8cad45944dae Of course, there’s plenty more to talk about. Arif and I lead off the podcast with a story about Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed giving our podcast an 11th-hour stiffarm. From there, we segue into talking about the undefeated Vikings, who don’t even respect themselves at this point. We also try to sort out why the Houston Texans’ seemingly all-world defense has fallen off a cliff, we speculate on a potentially lingering cold war between Ravens QB Lamar Jackson and his team’s upper management, and we preview a fairly attractive Week 8 slate. As always, there is ZERO talk of gambling, fantasy football, or any of that other tedious bullshit. This is All Ball, where we only care about the good stuff.

The Chiefs have found themselves in a pickle. Their longtime kicker, Harrison Butker, kind of sucks. He has missed five of his 16 field goal attempts so far this season, including two in Sunday's loss to the Seahawks. This scenario, in which a once-reliable kicker stops being useful, is one teams deal with all the time, and it comes with a relatively easy solution: You cut the guy and sign one of the many unemployed kickers floating around the league's margins. Butker isn't just any kicker, though. He's also a conservative freak and a misogynist, which means that the Chiefs could make themselves far less odious by cutting him. You can't just let someone that awful and despised walk out the door without replacing at least some of what he brings to the table, though. Which brings us to today's news: The Chiefs have signed Justin Tucker to the practice squad. According to ESPN, Tucker has been signed to Kansas City's practice squad to "serve as insurance" to Butker. The message the Chiefs are sending to their struggling kicker is clear: You think we can't find a guy who is even more of an awful person than you are? Think again. Tucker, who turns 37 next month, has been out of the NFL since 2025. The Ravens released him that spring after 16 massage therapists from eight different spas in the Baltimore area accused Tucker of sexual misconduct. The Baltimore Banner published multiple stories in which massage therapists who worked at these spas described Tucker exposing his erect penis, brushing his fingers against their thighs, and leaving ejaculate on the massage table. Tucker received a 10-game suspension for violating the NFL's personal conduct policy, which he served last season.

This World Series felt like it was in danger of losing its steam, as they all do when one team begins forcefully applying a throw pillow to the face of the other. The Milwaukee Brewers had kept the Tampa Bay Devil (yeah, we said it) Rays at arm's length through each of the first three games, and even though those had been interesting and even occasionally wacky games, they all ended the same way. The specter of a cold winter and uncertain spring loomed larger with each evening's parade of invincible Brewers relievers. Thus, the desperate need for a complete and utter piefight in Game 4, with extra innings, bonfires in both bullpens, a hilarious ending followed by a more hilarious ending to that ending, and, best of all, an additional game of baseball. Game 5 is tonight, and will be played between two teams that now seem just a bit better matched than they had four-and-a-half hours earlier. The basic cadaver of the story is this: Tampa won Game 4 by the score of 4-3, in 12 innings. In so doing they extended the Series at least another day and put off the moment when everyone who cares about baseball will have to start thinking about the impending lockout. But the autopsy is always about the details, and it is the way in which the Rays went about the business of desperate flailing that breathed new life and interest into what had become a slightly too clinical clash of champions.