NowLoop

TRENTON, N.J. — The Trenton Transit Center isn't pretty, or even notable, and it won't win any architectural awards, but it gets the job done if you're coming down to see Tomohiro Ishii wrestling in the Garden State's capital. Ishii alone is worth any length of train journey, even if he's definitively past his prime at 50 years old. Short, wide, and hairless, New Japan Pro Wrestling's signature mid-card tough guy is my all-time favorite in the squared circle. Nicknamed "The Stone Pitbull," he walks to the ring with a lumbering gait, looking about as flexible as a He-Man action figure, his movement as smooth as a Nintendo 64-era entrance animation. Even at his peak, Ishii was too small (5-foot-7) to ever really be considered for a run as a top guy, but what he lacked in main-event wins he made up for in attitude. And on this night Ishii held a special, sentimental status for me: one of the last working links to his company's illustrious, vanishing past. I love Ishii because his matches are formulaic. That word is almost always used as a criticism, but not here. He is so unrelentingly committed to his personal formula, night after night, year after year, that it long ago achieved a kind of authenticity. In the world of NJPW, striking Ishii is like fighting a brick wall. He stands tall in the aftermath of powerful blows. He gets right up from suplexes to deliver one of his own. If you back him into a corner, he'll growl in your face before delivering an onslaught of chops and forearms. Like watching Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford, you see it enough times, and the actor and the character blend together. On this night Ishii wrestled Boltin Oleg, a 33-year-old strongman from Kazakhstan who came to pro wrestling relatively late after a successful run as a legit amateur. Boltin's probably not the future of this company, but he's interesting in large part because he isn't an especially polished worker. He's got a great body and a lot of raw strength, and in the hands of an experienced opponent, he can be molded into a compelling foe.

We’re kind of the big puzzle on campus. This week's crossword was constructed by Bill Ouska, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Billy is a corporate attorney based in Dallas who’s thrilled to have the opportunity to combine his love of sports with his love of crosswords. 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 United States and Israel started a war with Iran over the weekend, dropping bombs in multiple cities across that country. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the bombing. So too, according to reports, were more than 100 children at a school in the Iranian city of Minab. Iran's retaliatory strikes against U.S. military bases in the Middle East have so far resulted in at least four dead American service members. Three American F-15 fighters have also been shot down over Kuwait, reportedly by friendly fire. Israel has also begun attacking Lebanon, and Iran has extended its retaliation to oil production facilities in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. While bringing the Middle East to the brink of total war, Donald Trump found a few minutes on Sunday to speak to reporters from The New York Times. The resulting article is a stunning instance of three reporters attempting to to apply a sheen of reason and dignity to the ramblings of a confused old man. "Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown," was the strained description the Times cooked up for what Trump had to say about his plans for Iran. He first suggested that Iran's elite military forces turn over its weapons to the country's populace, voluntarily abdicating power. "They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it," Trump said. He then suggested that Venezuela, and the succession of power that occurred after the United States kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro, could serve as a model for how the administration might achieve its goals. "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario," Trump said. "Everybody’s kept their job except for two people." Trump also indicated that he had "three very good choices" for whom he wanted to assume power in Iran.

Most "women’s sports novels" are really novels about girls. In them, girlhood is something mourned before it's over. Like the games themselves, the books are set to ticking clocks. When the high school field hockey players of Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks grill their teammate Kendra about losing her virginity, their inquest feels less nosy than urgent. "Time was running out, adultdom just around the corner," the novel's collective narrator says. "One by one, sex was coming for us, sex and death and taxes. We wanted to make sure it didn’t catch us unaware." These novels see sports as an open field or training ground, a means by which girls can work out angst and desire—or even just retreat from them. In Marisa Crane's A Sharp Endless Need, published this past May, a high school basketball star is consumed by longing for a teammate. The game offers Mack "a place that existed outside of human curses." Gopi, the 11-year-old narrator of Chetna Maroo's Western Lane, picks up squash while she grieves her dead mother. Her age belies her skill at observation; Gopi is attuned to more than her father and sisters would guess. Squash grants her peace from this heaviness. On the court, "no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think." They aren't so dissimilar, the patterns of sports and girlhood. What is teenage life but assigning too much importance to random and quickly forgotten events? "We wanted legacy … our names in bright lights, our names in everyone's mouths," A Sharp Endless Need begins, in a breathless prologue. Mack's feelings are cooled by the epilogue, her hoop dreams unrealized: "Now, though, we also want wisdom, we want quietude, we want the sweet decadence of boredom."

Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran Saturday morning, bombing several cities in the country. As a result, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, his death confirmed by state media Sunday. Also included in the casualties were reportedly dozens of children at a girls' school. Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, said that more than 100 children were killed at the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyiba school in the city of Minab. The school was located near an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base. Via the Washington Post, photos and videos showed rescue workers digging through the rubble and backpacks covered in dust and blood. One video showed a man holding up a severed arm. A spokesperson for United States Central Command said it was looking into the reports. In an article published Saturday, Drop Site spoke to some of the parents of the victims:

At Defector, we like weird sports eaters. The demands of elite performance encourage monomania, which is expressed by your various sports freaks as often inviolable, occasionally bizarre food restrictions. Even sports commentators and hot-takers get in on it: Skip Bayless famously eats nothing but sauceless chicken and broccoli, ordered in five-day batches; Jim Nantz religiously throws away the final bite of each halftime hot dog he's ordered as an NFL broadcaster; and Don Cherry took a midday boost from salmon-and-mayo sandwiches ritually aged to a consistency once described by Ron MacLean as "more like a pudding." A true grinder will do profoundly gut-busting things in order to survive and thrive at the upper echelons of North American sports. For pitcher Ryan Lambert, who is presently working his way up the Mets farm system, this means eating like a champion. A champion mongoose. A mongoose who has discovered a nest full of plover eggs—several, in fact. A mongoose who raids half a dozen nests full of eggs every waking day of their life. Per a report from Anthony DiComo of MLB.com, Lambert "came across an internet video" two years ago, and took from it the message that he should consume 30 raw eggs per day. "Day 1, it was an adjustment for sure. But I’m not a chicken," Lambert told DiComo, presumably by way of heading off any accusations of cannibalism. "I like a little adversity and challenge. It kind of gets me going." Lambert's commitment to dietary excellence means eating a grilled steak and sweet potato dinner "most days." In a ritual that I am sure makes him extremely popular with his colleagues, Lambert will reportedly sometimes wander the clubhouse dining room "to examine his teammates' plates for nutritional value," poking at them for succumbing to temptation. According to DiComo, last year Lambert ordered "a bowl of chicken hearts" while eating with a teammate in a restaurant.

Lu Dort is often finding new ways to do some bullshit just on the edge of the accepted rules of basketball. The difference this weekend was that the Oklahoma City Thunder wing went too far and got caught for it, even though that didn't stop his team from playing the victim. In the fourth quarter of Friday's game, Dort stuck out his leg to trip Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic after the inbound pass. An official called a foul on the play, but while Dort acted like he was wrongly accused, an incensed Jokic popped up and got in his face. Dort's teammate Jaylin Williams stepped in, and he and a still-fuming Jokic grappled as players and coaches attempted to separate them. Isaiah Joe was there, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otvGEQF0VXk

Kristaps Porzingis is out indefinitely due to illness, according to Golden State's injury report. What illness? That question is the subject of some controversy. Porzingis has been broadly unwell since the spring of 2025, when he was with the Boston Celtics and found himself suffering from extreme exhaustion toward the end of the regular season. Boston was bounced in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season, Porzingis was a shell of himself, and over the summer he was diagnosed by doctors with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. A key part of that sentence is "by doctors." According to Fred Katz of The Athletic, who reported on Porzingis's condition this past October, it was doctors who made the diagnosis, and it was doctors who outlined diet and lifestyle practices for managing the condition. His season so far has been rough: With the Atlanta Hawks, Porzingis played just 17 of 53 games, and while his production was respectable, he was limited to a career-low 24 minutes per game. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr seems to have his own sources for gathering medical information. In an interview with local radio Friday evening, he described his process. "When I heard about the trade, I read about the POTS diagnosis," said Kerr, who probably does not have a medical library and was almost certainly typing shit into an internet browser. For more information, Kerr called Onsi Saleh, the former Warriors vice president who's presently the general manager of the Hawks, the franchise that was at that moment in the process of trading Porzingis to the Warriors. "He's a good friend of mine and I said 'Is this POTS story real?' And he said, 'It’s actually not POTS.' That was some misinformation that was out there. I don’t know if anybody’s asked him about it."

It is once again time to have a staff chat. We'll be hanging out in the comments, ready to answer whatever questions you have. Update (3:17 p.m. ET): OK we're wrapping up here! Thanks for joining, everyone.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.  The testimony was part of a bellwether trial in California in which a 20-year-old woman, referred to in the trial as K.G.M., or "Kaley," alleges that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive and that her addiction to Instagram and YouTube specifically contributed to the degradation of her mental health. Meta's lawyers argue that the mental health problems she suffered as an adolescent were caused by separate trauma and abuse. So far, the trial has hinged mainly on the question of whether social-media addiction is possible, from a psychiatric perspective. Meta is arguing that there is a difference between "problematic" and "clinically addictive" usage, and that the company and Zuckerberg are not responsible for negative mental health outcomes produced or exacerbated by extreme use of their platforms. Meanwhile, YouTube is arguing that it simply isn't a social media platform at all, despite its pushes in recent years into short-form video that looks an awful lot like Instagram and TikTok, as well as photo-based posts.