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This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member. The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and anywhere, they like. Except for … One of the biggest events of the summer has been a mystery: When and where are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married? And when does everyone get to celebrate? New details confirmed by The New York Times suggest a multiple-day event at Madison Square Garden, which an entertainment industry executive said Ms. Swift had rented. The entertainment industry executive and another person with knowledge of the matter described the anticipated festivities: On July 2, the plans call for an intimate gathering of about 100 people at the Garden. The next day on July 3, about 1,000 guests would gather there for a splashier celebration, with possible stage appearances. Seriously? You two are getting married at Madison Square fucking Garden? YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent. I also would have known that Drummond was a multi-hyphenate of the oddest sort: a musician/producer/promoter/performance artist/carpenter who, in tandem with Cauty, infamously took a million pounds sterling from their KLF earnings and deliberately lit it on fire. Now, the easiest explanation as to why these two men set a bagful of money on fire is that they were fucking insane. But if you’ve read author John Higgs’s incredible history of The KLF, as I just did, you might be more amenable to its founders’ runaway train of thought. After all, you don’t help stage a 12-hour production about the Illuminati, shepherd Echo & The Bunnymen into the British mainstream, become worldwide pop stars in your own right, and then delete your entire back catalog without something, possibly drug-aided, going on up there. Is it not worth following your muse, even if that muse might come off as superficially cuckoo-nanners? Is there not value in the act of creation, and of creative destruction? In fact, what if art is at its core an act of conjuring? Of magic? Also, why did Tammy Wynette decide to lay down a track for these two lunatics when they cold-called her? THAT, my friends, is (kinda) the subject of this week’s Distraction.

Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the sound of his own voice saying all the famous things that he says. The picture-book binaries that define and proscribe his understanding of the world—big and small, good and bad, hot and cold, rich and poor, white and not white—set the boundaries, but there is not any editorial process beyond that. No one who serves him would ever give him notes, and he would never deign to take them from anyone in his service anyway. Everything he says or does is just a thing that happens; a dishearteningly large portion of political media comes down to making sure that people who follow current events are made aware of it whenever it does. They're good at this, too, which means that you are probably aware that Trump frequently delivers some version of this statement, which is from a speech he made on Dec. 17, 2025: "One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months."

To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia. Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark. In the 1500s, European exploration and subsequent exploitation of other continents introduced Europe to many exotic new species which wound their way into fine art. Unlike other painters of his age, Brueghel avoided including mythical creatures like unicorns in his landscapes. To Brueghel, the newfound abundance of the planet's species was heaven enough. Many Renaissance painters illustrated exotic animals from descriptions, leading to fantastical or off-kilter representations, such as Francesco Bianchi Ferrari's 16th-century Arion riding on a Dolphin, which which calls into question whether Ferrari had ever seen a dolphin or a child. But Brueghel painted many of these foreign creatures from life. In 1606, when Brueghel was appointed to be a court painter for Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella, cousins and co-monarchs of the Habsburg Netherlands, he visited their extensive menagerie and saw animals only recently transported from the Americas. There was a fishpond stocked with tortoises and crayfish. There was an aviary with turkeys, canaries, Indian hens, white and colored peacocks, grouse, pheasants, partridges, nightingales, quails, Icelandic sparrow hawks, a scarlet macaw, and a toucan. There were tiny lion tamarin monkeys, cotton-head tamarins, and marmosets. There were camels as well. Brueghel did not just sprinkle these exotics in his 1613 painting The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark; he placed them in situ. He tried, to the best of his knowledge, to illustrate them interacting with each other and the world just as they would in their own wildernesses. Brueghel's 1611 painting Air represents the apex of such an imagined aviary, with toucans, peacocks, swans, both scarlet and blue-and-yellow macaws, turkeys, owls, and an ostrich. Each of these exquisitely rendered species surrounds the Greek muse Urania, who holds an armillary sphere. But Air is not just the domain of the avian. Four other fliers populate the painting. They are bats, and Brueghel's naturalist bent means the bats, too, are identifiable. The bat in the left corner is a vesper bat, distinguished by its long ears. The two in the middle appear to belong to the family Vespertilionidae. And the bat at the top right looks to be a noctule bat with a bird in its mouth. As such, a new study in PNAS suggests that Brueghel's Air represents the first direct evidence of bird-eating noctule bats.

The Boston Celtics finally found another team serious about trading for Jaylen Brown. Following a couple of weeks where everyone offered their own opinion about the star's true value, the Philadelphia 76ers came in with a real offer—"real" in that it existed and was accepted, not that it was good for the Celtics. Those dreams of acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo or even Jamal Murray in exchange for Brown did not come to pass. Boston's reality is this, as reported Wednesday night by ESPN's Shams Charania: Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-rounders. That's it. That's what the Celtics accepted for the five-time All-Star and 2024 Finals MVP, whom they gave to a conference rival. The LaMelo Ball trade involved more first-rounders. The goddamn Walker Kessler trade involved more first-rounders! The Celtics weren't discreet about their willingness to move Brown, after a season that began with low expectations due to Jayson Tatum's recovery from an Achilles injury suffered in the 2025 playoffs, then became surprisingly competitive, then concluded in embarrassing fashion when the team blew a 3-1 series lead to the Sixers in the first round. Brown reacted to that postseason collapse by going on Twitch to litigate the officiating and complain about how much Joel Embiid flops. Now those two are teammates. The Celtics humiliated themselves as well as the guy they traded away.

It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch their team hunker down, absorb constant pressure from the opponent, and pray to god that they can hold onto the lead. It's not always like this, though. Sometimes, the talent disparity between two teams is so vast that the superior squad can go down a man and still control the game, even dominate it in certain phases. It's rare to see this happen, and when it does it serves as a reminder of how far talent, and each individual player's belief in their own talent, can go. So imagine my surprise, my utter, worldview-altering shock, upon seeing the USMNT, the historically talent-deficient and swaggerless international soccer team I've loved but never expected much from, brush away Bosnia and Herzegovina in the knockout round, 2-0, despite being down a man for 36 minutes. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a very good team, and the Dragons were proving it through the first 64 minutes of Wednesday night's game. Folarin Balogun's goal in the 45th minute was the result of a sustained application of pressure from the Americans that could have produced another goal or two had a few breaks gone the other direction. The USMNT was in control, and cruising towards the round of 16, until Balogun was banished from the field thanks to a VAR-induced red card.

Though the emotional appeal of soccer is immediate and visceral, especially in the shortcut-to-passion context of an international tournament like the World Cup, the real richness of the game is subtle. The uninitiated often find it difficult to access that depth. For better and for worse, the ball hypnotizes the novice eye. This is good, because what happens to the ball is what's most important. But it's also bad, because it's what happens around the ball that determines what happens to it. To paraphrase a famous line, if you watch the ball you'll see the plays, but it's by watching what happens off the ball that you truly see the game. The World Cup is of course the main conversion event of the world's biggest (semi-)secular religion. As such, it's always good to help the legions of neophytes find their way into the sport's bottomless depth. Our very own Luis did just that before this World Cup started, writing a good guide for where to train your eyes in order to really read the game. I behoove anyone interested in scriptural analysis to read that post and watch a game the way Luis advises. This post, however, is about catching the Holy Ghost. And there's no better way to do that, to really feel the power of soccer, than by watching France play. What stands out about this particular France team is that there is nothing subtle about it. They are so good in such an obvious way that even a total newcomer to the game can notice. All you have to do is look at the guy who has the ball, and he will do something to blow your mind.

The Miami Marlins are a winning baseball team. For now. That revelation comes after one of their finest months ever, a 20-6 run that began, hilariously enough, after being swept in a three-game series by the gangrenous Mets and falling behind them in the NL East race. This would be a point of deep shame for most teams, but the Fish have been coated, breaded, and fried in shame for most of their existence, and utterly wretched since their last World Series championship 23 years ago. They ended May with a 26-34 record. Getting swept by the Mets, even these Mets, fell safely under the category of "Things I Don't Have To Notice For Any Reason Whatsoever." But the curative powers of the Mets beating you are apparently underappreciated: Since that moment, the Mets haven't beaten any one team twice in a row, while the Marlins are 46-40 on the season and suddenly mere percentage points out of a wild-card spot for the first time in ... oh god, don't make us look this up. We've waded through enough of the Marlins' historical cesspool as it is. Still, the Marlins have won more games in a calendar month only one other time in their history—May of 2012, when they won 21—and had a run differential of plus-53, their best in any month ever. They are the best team in baseball if the season had started on June 1, and it's hard to comprehend why, because any thought when it comes to the Miami Marlins begins with "What?" then sails past "Why?" and lands on "Leave me alone, you quivering bag of coleslaw in human clothes."

If there's one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we've seen so far, it's this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Michael Olise, Harry Kane—all of these guys have been playing out of their minds since the first group-stage games, and each has taken a deserved turn as the tournament's brightest star. Right now, minutes after England's 2-1 victory over DR Congo in the round of 32, it's Kane who reigns as the world's best and brightest. DR Congo did everything an underdog is supposed to do in order to win a game like the one they just lost. They met England with more tenacity than the Three Lions may have been expecting, they defended like psychopaths, they scored early, and their attacks were dangerous enough to genuinely rattle the English players. After Brian Cipenga's opening goal in the seventh minute, DR Congo would hold on to a 1-0 lead for 68 minutes. Each minute that passed seemed to further fray the confidence of their opponents, as did a series of tremendous saves by Congolese keeper Lionel Mpasi.

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was recorded hours before Jalen Duren's representatives committed to using the Sacramento Kings as an unwitting partner in scrabbling a bit of leverage from the Detroit Pistons, which would have been great to talk about, but does not really change too much of the first bit of the show. Maitreyi Anantharaman came back on to talk Duren, Jaylen Brown, and Analyticsgate, but mostly to catch us up on the WNBA season. We talked a ton about her incredible Olivia Miles profile, which you should all go read right now! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!