NowLoop

The concept of A Cop On The Edge was once a disreputable film genre unto itself. This was not really a good thing in terms of what it indicated about where the culture was on the issue of vigilante violence, among other things. But its passing is also unworthy of much mourning because these movies were bad enough that one of the genre's signature moments was a twitchy and inexplicably be-gloved Sylvester Stallone cutting a slice of pizza with some desk scissors while wearing sunglasses indoors. All of the defects in our popular and political culture naturally flow in the direction of making the archetypal furious American dunce into a hero, and the fantasy of a man Taking Matters Into His Own Hands after being Pushed To The Limit, with maximal punishment exacted against everyone you'd expect, has certainly not gone anywhere. I do not want to give the impression that anything has really improved in this area. It's just that, where this particular archetype is concerned, the actual fact of the thing cannot measure up to the impossibly alpha and normal image of Sylvester Stallone wearing leather driving gloves while eating pizza in a way that no one has ever eaten pizza before in 1986's Cobra. In reality, what we are talking about when we talk about guys like this is a man repeatedly trying and failing to maintain some semblance of emotional control in defiance of their own issues and inadequacies before melting down and lashing out, generally while pulling a bunch of undignified faces in the process. This is not a cool and commanding figure; what we are dealing with, when and where we deal with this type of man, is a beet-red umpire type guy flipping his shit for reasons that he can't remotely comprehend. This turns out to be a difficult thing to cheer for, both at a moment when people like that are in charge of everything and also just on principle. The incident of Ump On The Edge behavior that led to a moment of inspiring solidarity between the St. Louis Cardinals and Colorado Rockies during Saturday's game began on Friday night, when home plate umpire Doug Eddings took it upon himself to enforce some unwritten rules on rookie Cardinals reliever Hancel Rincon as he made his big-league debut in the sixth inning.

Do you believe that Formula 1 can be romantic? Before immediately answering to the negative, at least consider Kimi Antonelli. He is freshly 20 years old, and just became the first Italian driver to win the Italian Grand Prix since Ludovico Scarfiotti did so in 1966. If your answer is still negative, and fair enough, at least consider that Antonelli achieved his victory by breaking the record for most overtakes during a Grand Prix in F1 history and after starting from P19 on the grid. Consider, too, that this is Monza we're talking about. If the answer is still negative, well. Have you ever considered becoming Italian and seeing how that changes your perspective on the matter? Before getting to Sunday, we must first go through Saturday, a fact that is true of the passage of time more generally and F1 race weekends specifically. Antonelli was a non-factor on Saturday by choice; with either the broader Drivers Championship picture in mind or the kind of confidence only accessible to people who just turned 20, he chose to tank an engine penalty in his overtake-happy home race. As a result, Antonelli spent most of qualifying on tractor duty and giving his Mercedes teammate, George Russell, a tow by providing a consistent slipstream. The final qualifying shootout came between Russell, overwhelming race favorite, and Pierre Gasly in an Alpine. Gasly is one of the more successful of his cohort of Max Verstappen's second drivers that Red Bull has ruined, which means that he has showed enough pace to stick around in F1, but not enough to emerge as a serious contender. Last year, Alpine was the worst team on the grid. This year, though the team remains haunted by Flavio Briatore's presence, they have a more respectable place on the midfield. There was nothing in that rise to competence that would suggest how well they performed during qualifying this weekend. In Gasly's specific case, his performance was a minor miracle. Through careful timing of his final lap and not setting a tire wrong, Gasly squeezed out the 0.060 seconds necessary to take pole position—the first of his career—away from Russell.

Given that tennis is effectively professionalized, legalized psychological torture, a choke and an epic comeback often go hand-in-hand. Take, say, when Zheng Qinwen faced Madison Keys at the U.S. Open on Saturday. Zheng won a match in which she was down 6-1, 6(3)-7, 5-1 and had to save a match point on her opponent's serve. A comeback, absolutely, but also, perhaps, a choke on Key's part. So: yea or nay? If one were to point to said match to support the case for "yea"—shown in the extraordinarily meager and insufficient official highlights here at 2:18—it would not be because Keys lost that point but because of how she lost it. Viewed in isolation, the match point looks like it was lost after a good return on an 85-mph second serve. In context, it is worse: Keys caught her first ball toss, then decided to more or less just kick in an 85-mph first serve. Zheng made a backhand return that was deep but not necessarily unmanageable, but Keys's feet got stuck as she hit a backhand into the net. Deuce. Zheng returned a 105-mph first serve on the next point, then finished a brief rally by smashing an off backhand that hit the line. On break point, Zheng made a weak, shallow return that Keys misread, hitting a weak forehand up the middle rather than a plus-one winner. That limp forehand allowed Zheng to wrestle control of, and ultimately win, the point. Zheng Qinwen would not lose another game for the rest of the match; conversely, Madison Keys would not win another one. After Keys was broken for a third consecutive time to go down 6-5 in the final set, she smacked her head with her racket several times. On Zheng's own match point at 6-5, 40-30, she successfully wrestled a backhand down the line off a strong Keys return, and Keys hit a running forehand error. Game, set, match.

Even before it slipped into janky comedy in its dying moments, you wouldn't necessarily say that Michigan's season opener against Western Michigan on Saturday was "a good football game." But also just making such an assessment would be missing the point to an extent. It was certainly shaping up as a very specific type of college football game. It's one in which a power conference team playing poorly loses to a MAC team—it has to be a MAC team; that's the type of game it is—that makes fewer mistakes. This is not necessarily a fun kind of game to watch, although if you're on social media at the moment it can be fun to watch other people watching it. But it is absolutely a type of game that happens, and one of the gnawing anxieties that would confront a FBS team—especially one fresh off a bunch of queasy and humiliating scandals, with a new coach and a bunch of new players—is that they have become a team that this type of game would happen to. UMass breaking a 16-game, 677-day losing streak against Rutgers last week is the most degrading possible version of this type of game, even before the Greg Schiano aspects of it enter the equation. Western Michigan defeating Michigan, at Michigan, on the strength of four field goals from a rosy-cheeked backup kicker named Dieter Kelly, would have been something like its apex. And while the game was not a thriller by any stretch, there was some formalist satisfaction in watching it drearily assume the form of the type of game that it was revealing itself to be. Michigan QB Bryce Underwood fumbled the second snap he received, and while he recovered on that play thanks to a circus catch from transfer WR JJ Buchanan and led a touchdown drive on that possession, Underwood and the Michigan offense were basically never in rhythm or especially close to scoring again after that. They were 3-for-10 on third-down conversions, and Underwood—a big-ticket recruit furnished to the program by leathery cultural villain Larry Ellison as a gift to what the Wall Street Journal described as "his mystery wife"—was wobbly and over-aggressive and generally doing too much in ways that could have made things even worse than they were; he was called for a holding penalty in the third quarter that negated a long Michigan gain, lost a fumble, and only escaped throwing a pick-six at the end of the first half when a replay review showed that the Western Michigan's Dillon Moore had stepped out of bounds on his return. This is foreshadowing.

Sometimes the chaotic, unforgiving universe briefly and ecstatically snaps itself into harmony, like when the Fibonacci sequence shows up in a head of Romanesco broccoli, or a small rock balances atop a bigger rock, or when a certain permanently adrift Australian basketball player brings his destiny into sudden coherence. By which I mean: Ben Simmons is a Sacramento King. Simmons has taken the long road to Sacramento, though every step of his career has brought him closer to what Rudy Gay infamously yet correctly termed "Basketball Hell." In 2021, his top-seeded Philadelphia 76ers were in fantastic position to make it to the Eastern Conference Finals, only to get humiliated by the fifth-seeded Atlanta Hawks, as Simmons, on his home floor in Game 7, forgot how to dunk the basketball. This broke the Sixers. Simmons would never play for them again: The following season he staged an agonizing holdout under the pretense of a back injury that involved Joel Embiid and Doc Rivers debasing themselves, Simmons loafing through practice and then getting kicked out, and inadvertently creating the conditions for Tyrese Maxey to flourish. The Sixers traded Simmons to Brooklyn—while the borough is not remotely on the Sacramento spectrum, the Nets certainly are—where he flailed around hopelessly for chunks of two-and-a-half injury-marred seasons. Was he a small-ball center? Jumbo Rajon Rondo with a concussion? A defensive specialist? Not really, no; he was terrible, though in a way that seemed as much a matter of effort and intensity as a matter of talent.

As the media has covered the NBA's severe punishment of Steve Ballmer and the Los Angeles Clippers as a result of the Kawhi Leonard investigation, a common idiom has emerged: League commissioner Adam Silver dropped the hammer on them. He did not throw the book at the Clippers, or take a crowbar to their knees. No, there was only one tool in his toolbox, and it was dropped on the perpetrators. Obviously, this phrase is not unique to this specific scandal; anyone old enough will remember NFL commissioner Roger "Ginger Hammer" Goodell in the 2010s, when he was playing Whack-A-Mole so intently that he inadvertently created a league value system in which smoking weed was treated more harshly than domestic violence. But "dropping the hammer" is effective shorthand, a way to declare in a few words that authority has been wielded and a problem has been definitively solved. The book has been closed on the matter, perhaps because a hammer has nailed it shut. Silver and the NBA will happily accept this framing. It's so easy that even Shams Charania and his endless metaphors couldn't complicate it—if he hadn't biffed the story, that is. Still, it's funny to see how many places are running with this exact choice of words. Some of these outlets add a little flair by specifying the type of hammer, or elucidating who was or wasn't struck by it. Sometimes the hammer drops; sometimes it is brought down; sometimes "hammer" is the verb, leaving open the question of what hammer-like implement was used. (Could it have been a truncheon?) Below is a list of some hammerings.

Some people are fans of the Seattle Seahawks. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Seattle Seahawks. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Seattle Seahawks. Your 2025 record: 14-3. Super Bowl champions. One of the best teams in modern history if you go by DVOA, which I don’t because Aaron Schatz has never revealed the formula behind his hallowed metric. He could calculate it by mashing on an old Casio, for all I know. But here’s what I do know: These Seahawks won a title last year thanks to a playoff schedule that may as well have been drawn up by a kindergarten teacher:

The first time I consciously contemplated a museum’s installation-specific smell was in Fernando Romero’s “El Sol” at Kristallwelten in Innsbruck, Austria. Viewers stand in a cave-like, red-lit room under a Swarovski crystal sphere exactly one-billionth the size of the sun. It even sounds like the sun—the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy spent 30 years recording solar acoustic wave data, which has been sped up about 100,000 times to create the installation’s soundscape.  Standing in the room is somehow both soothing and disconcerting. If you don’t read the informational display or listen to the audio tour, you might feel like you’re just standing under a particularly fancy disco ball, listening to a higher-pitched edit of dry wind across an empty plain. But it was the scent of the room that struck me: a blend of thyme, black juniper, moss, and gunpowder, inching the red cave toward the realm of the uncanny with the combination of color, sound, and scent, making it easy to envision yourself in the isolation of space or a very high-concept haunted house where that staticky pulsing wind might start saying your name.  Many of Kristallwelten’s other rooms (Chambers of Wonder, as they call them) have scent concepts as well, though less distinct. The rooms smell pleasant, usually lightly herbaceous. There’s a lot of pine and mint to go with all that glittering crystal. It makes sense for a museum that’s essentially a very lovely Swarovski advertisement. 

If you’re as horny for football as I am, you’ve probably noticed that a vast, vast majority of NFL podcasts have some unwelcome amount of gambling/fantasy chatter in them. Corporate pods are often directly in bed with the sportsbooks, and a great number of indie pods have to take the books’ sponsorship money if they…

In 1858, William Parker Foulke, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences—a group of naturalists committed to public education and outreach—was on vacation in the quiet Quaker community of Haddonfield, New Jersey. There, he befriended a local landowner, John Estaugh Hopkins, who showed him some unusually large vertebrae that had been dug up in a clay pit on his property 20 years prior. With Hopkins's permission, Foulke hired a crew to excavate the old pit. Around 10 feet deeper, the diggers' shovels clinked against a layer of fossil seashells and large bones. The skeleton unearthed from the pit was, at the time, the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever discovered, although it was unfortunately missing its head (and many other bones.) Ten years later, the dinosaur, Hadrosaurus foulkii, went on display at the what was then called the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia—the first-ever mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world at the first natural history museum in the Americas. The original mount of Hadrosaurus was not exactly accurate. The creature's skull was conjecture, as was its upright stance. But it drew throngs of crowds to the Philadelphia museum, so much so that they began charging an admission fee. It was the first time people could stand next to a dinosaur, an ancient, almost unimaginable creature with no resemblance to any living thing they'd seen. In 1876, the 10 million people who flocked to Philadelphia to celebrate the 100th birthday of the United States got to walk in the shadow of Hadrosaurus. For 15 years, the Hadrosaurus—nicknamed Haddy—was the only dinosaur skeleton on display anywhere in the world. (It lost this superlative when Iguanadons dug up from a Belgian coal mine were displayed in Brussels in 1883.) Although the mount was eventually disassembled, the bones remained at the museum, which was renamed the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in 2011 when it became affiliated with the local university. In the summer of 2025, a restored and updated mount of Haddy went back on view at the Academy after half a decade in storage.