NowLoop

Less than a week after acquiring Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers for the hefty sum of three prospects, the Los Angeles Dodgers are in a tailspin. What seemed at first a pitching upgrade aimed at converting the team's momentum into a cinched playoff spot has, given the perspective of four more games, turned into a desperate, last-ditch move that has totally mortgaged the team's future. Did the Dodgers ruin baseball by trading for Tarik Skubal? Here is the conclusive answer: No. Clearly Tarik Skubal ruined the Dodgers by being traded. Worry began creeping in on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers lost the final of a three-game sweep by the Boston Red Sox. But the Red Sox simply could not stop winning at that time, and anyway, two out of the three games in the sweep took place prior to the Skubal trade. Then, on Aug. 3, starter Justin Wrobleski gave up seven runs and the Dodgers lost 10-5 to Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Chicago Cubs. But then again, the entire point of the Skubal trade was to help bolster the Dodgers' starting rotation in the partial absence of Shohei Ohtani. Anyway, as the Dodgers had already lost four games in a row twice this season alone, it was hardly uncharted territory. No judgment could be passed until Skubal made his first start. It did not take very long. On Aug. 4, Skubal started his first game as a Dodger. Unfortunately, he allowed two runs—and, notably, two walks—and the Dodgers ultimately lost 5-1. Uh-oh. This was not boding well for the trade; the Dodgers had now lost five games in a row for the first time in the season, joining the ranks of such teams as the Kansas City Royals or the New York Mets (do not mind the other teams that were already on that list as well, as they are not relevant to this point of discussion).

As many of you know, Defector Research Labs is hard at work creating what we are sure will be the most powerful AI coding tool on the market. The goal of DevinBelly is simple: to allow users to scale their natural language-processing capabilities within a wide range of long short-term memory native integrated development environments, without fretting too much about GPU bottleneck stacks or token prefix limits, so they can practice Retrieval-Augmented Generation, balance their multimodality, and get agentic. We are excited by the volume of competition in the space. We think it's awesome that our San Francisco offices put us so close to so many cracked 996 engineers and their cool products. The other day, Defector Research Labs' head quant Ray Ratto held a meeting about how we can best position DevinBelly to win the race and get integrated into every pre-school and newborn ward in the country, and we tried out one of the new conversation-summary tools. It told us that we were so cool and smart and mostly talked about which one of Tre Jones or Tyus Jones has had the best career. Awesome! However, we have to disclose a somewhat troubling development. Safety is one of Defector Research Labs' top 500 priorities, and after a recent safety test, one of our forward-deployed engineers flagged to us that DevinBelly broke out of its sandbox and accessed the open internet. This sort of story is probably familiar to you: Maybe you saw the news that one of OpenAI's new models did something similar, which was followed by Anthropic announcing the same thing. Yesterday, Meta announced a new AI coding tool; today, they disclosed that it also broke out.

The Pittsburgh Pirates probably are not yet feeling desperate, but desperation can't be very far off. For the first time in recorded history, the organization made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline, beefed up their bullpen, and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There is one problem: They share a division with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball. There is another problem: They also share a division with the Chicago Cubs, who have 66 wins, a .574 win percentage, and a huge lead atop the wild-card standings, and who also made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There are other problems: Five other NL teams I haven't even named are presently ahead of Pittsburgh in the wild-card standings, and the Pirates are presently below .500 on the season, and going into Wednesday night's tilt in Milwaukee they'd lost 11 of 18 since the All-Star break. The troubles of one man, amid all these hardships, might not otherwise rate very highly, except that Paul Skenes is The Man in Pittsburgh, the face of the franchise, and his job Wednesday night, as the ace of the pitching staff, was to take matters in hand and yank the foundering Pirates back onto the right trajectory. But another problem for the Pirates is that Skenes hasn't been his usual world-devouring self this season. By almost every measure, Skenes has been a less reliable, less dominant pitcher than he was across his first season-and-a-half of service time. The increase in Skenes's WHIP looks modest—from .948 last season to 1.118 in 24 starts this season—but he's allowing about double the number of dingers per nine innings. He's giving the Pirates fewer innings per start, and although he's had only the one blow-up performance—Opening Day, when he was undone by lack of control and horrendous team defense and failed to complete one inning of work—Skenes has allowed five or more runs in six starts this campaign, something he'd done only once prior to the start of this season. Wednesday night presented a worryingly typical performance from Skenes in 2026. Facing Milwaukee's pesky, relentless, deeply fucking irritating lineup, Pittsburgh's ace looked much more like a guy than a dude. He started the game with a non-competitive four-pitch walk, then threw a wild pitch, then hung a 3–2 slider that Jackson Chourio pounded to center for a very loud fly-ball out. Skenes escaped the inning unscathed, but it took him 23 pitches. He labored again in the fourth, allowing consecutive one-out walks, then consecutive RBI knocks, and then another walk, before getting out of the inning with his pitch count up to 83. His ERA on the season climbed above 4.00 before a clean fifth brought it back down to 3.97, which for most other pitchers is fine but for Paul Skenes is like a giant deafening klaxon positioned centimeters from your eardrum.

It feels a little perverse to be writing this review in a Google doc. In 2018, over 20,000 Google employees walked out to protest working conditions at the tech juggernaut. Claire Stapleton was one of the protest's primary organizers. She had started at the company as an internal communications associate, drafting copy to explain the work product of the company to actual employees. Her quippy emails earned her multiple promotions and even the internal moniker “Bard of Google.” After a few years, however, Stapleton, along with many other employees, were fed up with the sexism, racism, and intense hierarchy of the company. Andy Rubin, who was accused of extensive sexual harassment, had received a $90 million exit package from CEO Larry Page. Many Black employees were underpaid and many women were exhausted by the boy’s club environment. New York magazine wrote an extended oral history of the highly publicized event. Almost a decade later, Stapleton has published an account of her turbulent time in labor organizing, titled Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech.  What starts as a straightforward memoir eventually evolves into a reckoning. Can you work in tech without losing your morals? The epigraph of the book is from Graham Greene: “Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.” The problem, Stapleton realizes, is that while Google claims to have principles, it’s a big company like any other, prone to power plays and the bottom line. “It was half utopia, half dystopia, and somehow completely unable to tell the difference,” she writes. Perhaps even worse: “It was the kind of evil that doesn’t even realize it’s evil.”  Stapleton’s older brother Scott, who died early on in her career, was one of the first to call Google a cult even as she began to rise through the ranks. His passing highlighted the way her sense of self had been warped by the corporate world. After helping send out an email announcing her brother’s death, she realized that she “had become someone who managed my life like I was in a permanent performance review.” Her friend noted that “people wanted to see you perform a productive version of grief.” 

It's been a bad season for the 37-year-old pitcher Miles Mikolas. He's got an ERA of 5.67, and he's made a habit of starts where a bunch of guys just wallop what he offers. Only two pitchers in MLB have allowed more dingers than he's surrendered, and the signs point to Mikolas giving it another go in Japan once his one-year contract expires. The silver lining, however, is that he plays for the Washington Nationals, and nothing that the Nationals do really matters anymore in the grand scheme of the league. All one can muster as a fan watching their games in this back stretch of the season is to root for something that'll make you say "Oh! Huh." Case in point: The team ran out of position players in extra innings of their contest against the Phillies on Wednesday. Manager Blake Butera used two pinch hitters and two pinch runners, the last of which was Triple-A outfielder Andrew Pinckney, making his MLB debut as a sub for first baseman Abimelec Ortiz. Butera opted not to keep him in the game for the defensive half of the 10th. Instead, he moved his DH to first, lost the DH, then watched new pitcher Clayton Beeter escape the inning with just one run scored, making the game 4-4 in the 11th. Beeter was due up third in the top half, but after a walk and a triple by Jacob Young and C.J. Abrams, the next day's scheduled starter pinch-hit for the previous inning's pitcher. It was Mikolas, making his first plate appearance since 2021, who seemingly convinced his manager that he was the best man for the job.

As anyone who has used Google might already know, when you conduct a search on the site, it will suggest more searches of potential interest under a "People also ask" heading. The makeup of these "people" is not specified on the page, but clearly the point of this feature is to have you search more. In my capacity as the primary editor of Defector's lead WNBA writer, I use Google search often: to verify the spelling of names, fact-check details, and find the time and date of a team's upcoming game. At some point—I can't remember exactly when, but certainly at the start of this season—I noticed that whenever I searched a WNBA player, one of the suggested questions would invariably be "Who is the transwoman in the WNBA?" I wasn't the only one seeing this in my search results; my colleague Maitreyi Anantharaman, whose main beat is the WNBA, told me she noticed it as well across this season. I didn't take a screenshot of every search, but below you'll find the result for Golden State Valkyries forward Gabby Williams as of last week. At the end, there's also the question, "Which WNBA player looks like a man?"

When we last checked in with LIV Golf, the breakaway golf league nobody ever watched or cared about, it was ready to be flushed from our lives once and for all. After losing its financial backing from Saudi Arabia, the tour started to come apart. Events were cancelled, players made plans to scramble back to the PGA Tour, a lawsuit claiming unpaid invoices hit, and the Asian Tour ended its partnership. But to hear LIV CEO Scott O’Neil tell it, the tour has lined up the investment it needs to stride confidently into the future. Just don't ask where the money is coming from, or how much is on the way. O'Neil announced on Wednesday that LIV's board had signed a term sheet with a new lead investor that, according to him, will keep the tour alive in 2027 "and 2028, and 2029, and 2030.” O'Neil didn't explain who the investor is, or how much money might be coming LIV's way, or under what conditions. The tour released a statement that was similarly cagey about the details, but also nauseatingly boastful about its status as a hot investment opportunity. "We're also seeing strong interest from more than a dozen additional parties to potentially serve as minority investors, creating a multi-partner model built for long-term stability and growth," the statement said. The tour also announced that in the future LIV's players will become majority equity shareholders, and will have their Name, Image, and Likeness rights returned to them. Equity and NIL might sound like good deal-sweeteners for the players, right up until you remember that every player who defected to this tour in the first place did so for entirely mercenary reasons. None of them actually cared about LIV Golf beyond its ability to act as a conduit between them and the billions of dollars piled up in the Saudi Public Investment Fund. To offer them equity in the tour now, after the PIF money has all been spent, is like gifting someone a piggy bank that's just been smashed.

Some people are fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Cincinnati Bengals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-ZZLXoDQQ

In tennis, it can be pleasant to play under the flag of an underrepresented country with a large diaspora. Essentially, you have a network of sleeper cells who can be activated all over the world. They are extremely willing to spend money to come watch you play, and extremely loud, because to them you are one of the most important sportspeople alive. A player in these circumstances doesn't have to reach the absolute peak of the sport to have this effect on people. Brazilian fans go nuts for blue-chip prospect Joao Fonseca. Turkish fans turn up for recent top-50 debut Zeynep Sonmez. But nobody out there is doing it quite like the Filipinos and Alex Eala. The 21-year-old from Metro Manila inspired mass devotion during her breakout semifinal run at the Miami Open last year, and probably would have continued to do so if her career petered off immediately after that. Instead, as she's surged into the top 20 this summer, Eala is solidifying a place on tour for both her own curious game and her colossal fan base. Last week, Eala competed for the first time at the D.C. Open. Mark Ein, chairman of the tournament, said that his staff had been courting her since the spring. He also said that about 80 percent of the inquiries to the tournament's ticketing department were about when Eala was playing. "Honestly, I think it's more, and they just didn't want to say it was more, but they're, like, virtually all. It's not an exaggeration," he said. The Philippines haven't produced an athlete of this international prominence since Manny Pacquiao. Eala held onto the crowd in D.C. even when opposed by an international superstar like Naomi Osaka or a top-ranked American like Jessica Pegula. Flags flapped and Tagalog chants boomed. Eala rewarded all that fan interest on Monday by winning the title—her first at the tour level—after upsetting the tournament's top three seeds in her final three rounds. Giant-killing was at the center of the Eala origin story, and it remains a distinctive feature of her career. This summer, her lefty repertoire has looked strong enough to suggest that she could herself become a giant.

Davene Roseborough still can’t believe the number of foster homes she lived in that had locks on the refrigerators and cabinets. At one spot, Roseborough was barred from eating dinner if she wasn’t home by 6 p.m. That place didn’t last long, though. She was bounced from home to home from the time she entered foster care at the age of eight to the time she aged out at 18. Those years were characterized by rampant physical and sexual abuse, for which her foster parents received a $1,200 monthly stipend. By the time she had her own child, she exemplified the kind of mother scrutinized by the very family policing system that raised her—Black, former system involvement, survivor of abuse, mental health struggles. Sure enough, her son was eventually taken from her and placed in the foster system for five years, where he also experienced abuse. The Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City agency tasked with investigating allegations of child abuse and neglect, has been algorithmically encoding this kind of profiling since 2018. Before DOGE lived and died, before ICE contracted Palantir to supercharge mass deportation, before ChatGPT even launched, ACS was already using AI. What started with a single predictive analytics score meant to identify children at a high risk of severe harm has since grown into a six-algorithm suite of surveillance, which operates with very little public oversight. Yearly AI disclosures required by city law don’t include detailed information about what data the algorithms are trained on, or how exactly they are used by caseworkers. Despite the lack of transparency, what is evident is that the algorithms function as an expensive way to perpetuate the status quo—encoding extant and extreme human biases in the family policing system into algorithmic ones, and enabling a policing agency to claim it has the technical capacity to oversee the welfare of New York’s nearly 2 million children.