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ATLANTA — The Golden State Valkyries’ most valuable player on Saturday afternoon finished with just four points, though by the standards of Kiah Stokes, that qualifies as a scoring outburst. A player with a zero-points-on-zero-field-goal-attempts-in-30-minutes performance to her name in these Finals, Stokes looked disconcertingly ready to fire in the first quarter of Game 4 in Atlanta, the Valkyries desperate after a pair of offensive disasters in Games 2 and 3. Usually when a pass finds Stokes wide open in the corner, you can practically hear a “wrong answer, try again!” buzzer sound as she swings it back to the top of the key. But when Veronica Burton drove the paint and kicked it out to Stokes a minute into the game, the center didn’t think twice about taking the shot. A miss in the end, yes, but a startling sight all the same.  After the game, Stokes told reporters that her “aggression” in the form of five first-quarter field goal attempts wasn’t really part of the plan. She had no designs on being a hero, no illusions about what her offensive contribution in the game was going to be. “For me, if you shoot it, it’s a chance to get a rebound and another possession,” she said. In Golden State’s 67-62 series-tying win against the Atlanta Dream on Saturday, that’s basically what every field goal attempt felt like: a chance for more field goal attempts. The Valkyries pulled down 13 offensive rebounds, eight of them thanks to Stokes, and forced 18 Dream turnovers to get the possession math working in their favor again—a strength of theirs, usually, but a struggle in their last two games. The series returns to San Francisco for Game 5 on Monday before heading back to Atlanta for a Game 6 on Thursday.

There are only three undefeated teams left in the top (as in moneyed) level of college football, which suggests that the word "elite" is being replaced by "last one standing." The middle shall hold because everyone is heading for it. This forms a tight braid with the other central truth about the sport, which is every fan base announcing loudly that someone must pay for their outsized expectations for teams who clearly don't deserve it. A year ago, this led to a flurry of coach firings that began in Week 3 (UCLA) and powered almost weekly into January. But all those contract settlements resulted in a new level of financial conservatism among athletic directors and other quarter-choking real estate speculators who decided that paying for people who don't work (fired coaches) is almost as bad as paying for people who do all the work (players). And "conservatism" in this case meant waiting an extra four weeks to start detaching heads from "head coaching."

This baseball postseason has a face, and it is Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy, standing on the bottom of step of his team's dugout, staring 25 yards into the distance and letting the dual features of his conscience balance on opposite shoulders arguing with each other over Aaron Ashby. The good angel is crying out, "He works every day. He deserves a break," and the bad one snarls back, like a cranky farmer, "But I need the milk now!" And time after time, the bad voice wins out because, well, yeah, the milk. The Brewers are two games up in the World Series after successive one-run victories over the Tampa Bay Rays, because that is their championship motif, letting the other guys score first and then slowly but inexorably catching up and passing them and then letting their formidable bullpen apply the pillow to the face. And by "bullpen," we mean Ashby more than anyone else, because he is having the most unreasonable postseason of a fella's dreams. Unreasonable in that in a sport where no trend lives forever, every game he has pitched has been eerily similar.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: We had ourselves the hell week of all hell weeks last Saturday. And in the aftermath, the top of the sport is upside down and everyone sounds incoherent—babbling and whining about which teams are good and which are bad, in tones you can otherwise only find from Old Testament prophets. Is Florida secretly good? Is Texas truly a tire fire? Is it going to come out that Cooper Manning never even showed Arch a football before college? Why can't Notre Dame close? Why would Oregon bench Dylan Raiola, just to play him in the fourth quarter against his former school? How did we end up with a first-ranked Miami? These are the questions left to us in the wake of some near-unprecedented football mayhem. The two directions left to go from here are either set the universal order right or make shit go even more left. I know what I choose. Ray: After the pyro-spectacular of last weekend, with all those ranked teams either losing outright or barely escaping defeat, something needed to be done to restore normalcy. And so Maryland fired head coach Mike Locksley on Tuesday. Locksley is most recently noted for having guided the Terps to 12 consecutive conference losses, seven of the last eight by double digits, and the most recent coming against Rutgers. The last and decisive one was just a seven-point loss, but it may as well have been 49 when you apply the added "You lost to RUTGERS?" metric.

Most owners of sports teams are wise enough to understand that their reputations will never be better than when their teams are winning. If they're fortunate enough to see that team capture a championship, they know that it's easy image rehabilitation. Just show some basic appreciation, sprinkle it around to everyone in the organization, and try not to say much aside from "We did it" and "Thank you." That way, the public will momentarily forget how you made your money off predatory mortgages or whatever. James Dolan has chosen a different path. Since June, when the New York Knicks won their first title in 53 years, the owner has done his best to make the victory lap as unpleasant as possible for all involved. At the championship ceremony, in a juiceless and mercifully short speech, Dolan took swipes at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and—for some reason—Knicks fans under the age of 53. He brought back notable creep Isiah Thomas, and appointed him to the team's board of directors. He scheduled a fundraiser for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman right before a Knicks preseason game, and has sued Wired magazine for reporting on the invasive surveillance technology he uses at Madison Square Garden. He's also played hardball in contract talks with the very stars who won a championship. It's rare to have a title-winning team begin its subsequent season on such a sour note. But wait, there's more: According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, the Knicks' pregame ceremony ahead of Tuesday's season opener was a bit more ceremonial than it appeared. Team president Leon Rose opened a box to show off his sparkly championship ring, but nobody on the coaching staff did, because their boxes were empty. They didn't have rings yet, and it was still unclear who would actually receive one. From the article:

I've been watching the "available storage" bars on my various digital storage systems creep up over the last couple years, with a growing sense of dread. Each percentage point is a tick closer to an upgrade to my package—money I'll have to pay Apple, Google, and Dropbox to continue to store my digital life. Maybe more importantly, I'm aware of just how much stuff I produce every day, and as the mess grows, I wonder if I should do something about it. On worse days, I think maybe I should just succumb to the digital hoarder house I've built for myself. It is probably my obsession with my own death, paired with the ever-present anxiety about whether the way I spend my days truly matters at all, that has led to an interest in personal archiving practices. My life's work amounts to several terabytes' worth of mp3s, wavs, text files, and jpegs that live on server space I pay to lease somewhere in the world. I like the idea of my work being accessible after I'm gone, and for a long time I trusted the infrastructure of the internet to do that archival work for me. But if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that only dummies blindly trust big tech to operate in their best interest. 

I don't know if Elizabeth Koch would fashion herself a personal essayist, but she has certainly dabbled in the form. In an 11-part essay published in Smith Magazine in 2007, the billionaire's daughter who describes herself as "apolitical" wrote about a trip she took to Japan with her boyfriend at the time, Todd. The essay opens with her and Todd buying candy-flavored drinks from a vending machine. They buy eight, take a sip from each, and then discard them on top of a mailbox, where Koch includes the following exchange. "Just line them up on top of the machine," I say. "Maybe a homeless person will find them." We look around. No sign of a homeless person. "What do you think they do with their homeless people here?" "They probably hide them wherever they hide the trash," Todd says. I laugh, and try to take his arm, but he rips it away from me. It is probably unsurprising that this is what Koch presumes passes for affectionate banter between her and Todd. Much of the essay appears to be a direct transcript between Koch and Todd, in which she quotes him saying "It's just up here" and "Huh." The two get into a fight after Koch buys Todd an expensive pair of headphones—a reminder to both of her unfathomable net worth—after which Todd walks away. Koch then wanders the streets and sees two Japanese people with albinism. "Their skin is pinkish and their hair is white and their bodies are lumpy, and I wonder what it would be like to be stripped of tone and color in a city where most everyone looks the same," Koch writes, before deciding to photograph the people—the photo appears in the body of the essay—so that she and Todd can talk about them later. She laments her privilege and its terrible, burdensome baggage. "I'm angry that those girls on the playground in sixth grade called me a rich bitch when they knew nothing about me except my last name," Koch writes, patently unaware that she is proving their thesis correct.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. This week, Kelsey was unable to participate in the challenge, due to scheduling. Bread Week never quite delivers. It's annoying, because bread-making is the quintessence of baking, and bread is considered by historians and whatnot to be one of humankind's very oldest prepared foods. A baking challenge that did not give proper space for straightforward bread-making would be, in a word, baloney. Also it just kicks ass to make a good loaf of bread, it's a proud accomplishment. A good homemade loaf of bread increases your Human Heritage score by one unit. You can reach into the past and link hands with the ancients by tying a good knot, or fashioning a clean dovetail joint, sure, but you cannot eat those things, and they do not smell good in your kitchen. Bake bread.

This week, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s most malevolent plots was finally brought to a halt when police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers who intended to carry out a hepatitis B vaccine trial that would have endangered thousands of newborn children in Africa and condemned some of them to an early, agonizing death. The trial was to be funded with $1.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This hopefully marks the end one of the most unethical research projects proposed in recent memory. (There is, by the way, some stiff competition there, what with the National Institute of Justice's recent announcement that it will fund $1 million in research into possible links between "gender dysphoria and violent crime.") If you had not heard of the Guinea-Bissau trial until now, you might be thinking, well, why do I need to know about a shitty trial that is now cancelled? To that I would say: It's important to pay attention to the kind of straightforwardly evil machinations RFK Jr. is trying to pull off to advance his anti-vaccine agenda, because he's very likely going to try to do something like this again. A huge part of the reason the Guinea-Bissau trial has flown largely under the radar—with the notable exception of ongoing coverage at The Guardian and Rolling Stone—is because it would take place in Africa and on African children, a population that, despite not living in the U.S., has already become a casualty of our stupid and monstrous government doing stupid and monstrous things with our tax dollars. So anyway, here's what happened. Sorry it is so long. It is intricately evil.

As a culture, we have a few familiar stories about talent. There’s the all-consuming kind, often first displayed in childhood, that makes people unsuited for the demands of everyday life. There are the stories about talent that goes tragically unrecognized until after a person has died. Alternatively, there’s the sort of talent that falls just short of greatness. Think Salieri, or that guy you work with who played sports in college. Martin Mull’s story is different. He had prodigious talents—as a musician, a stand-up comedian, an actor—and they were widely recognized throughout his long career. In 1970 he wrote the hit novelty song “A Girl Named Johnny Cash,” a parody of Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," then spent most of that decade touring his stand-up show regularly and successfully. He opened for Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, and was tapped by none other than TV icon Norman Lear to star in the mock talk show Fernwood 2 Night. Mull also guest-hosted for Johnny Carson more than 30 times. He became, through performances in a variety of films and television shows spanning decades, a guy you were always excited to see in a scene. He had one of those faces it felt like you’ve always known, whether it was as Colonel Mustard or Gene Parmesan. Through all of that, though, the one thing Mull really wanted to be known for was his painting.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb36KAQXIqw