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Sally Rooney, one of the most popular novelists alive, says she will no longer sell her books in the U.K. In 2025, the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, and in August of that year, Rooney published an op-ed in The Irish Times titled, "I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it." Now, because the laws have not changed, Rooney and her publisher Faber & Faber announced this week that they will no longer be publishing her work in the U.K. Rooney's novels have sold more than 2 million copies in the U.K. alone, a monumental number for any modern novelist. Her books Normal People and Conversations with Friends have been adapted for television. In her op-ed last year, Rooney stated that she intended to give the royalties from her books sold in the U.K., as well as her residuals from the television adaptions of her novels, to Palestine Action, a direct action network known for disrupting weapon manufacturers that sell arms to Israel. Under U.K. anti-terrorism laws, Rooney's publisher can no longer give her the royalties for her novels, knowing that she will donate them to Palestine Action, without putting them both at risk. Technically, Rooney's books could still be sold in the U.K., but she would not be paid for their sales. Her publisher did not want to withhold the earnings from her. "As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format," Faber & Faber said in a statement.

CHESTER, Penn. — For decades, the U.S. Women's National Team stood at the top of the mountain, where the air is thinnest. They defended their position with ferocity. They didn't win every major tournament, but they won most of them, and were contenders in all. Their identity on the pitch, more than anything, was being the best.  That changed with the 2023 World Cup, when the two-time defending champions flamed out in the round of 16 after barely surviving the group stage. Spain went on to win the tournament, and deserved to. That result, combined with Spaniard-heavy Barcelona's simultaneous surge on the European stage, made it clear that La Roja had pushed the USWNT off the side of the mountain and taken their place at the summit. The USWNT might have won the 2024 Olympics, but anyone with eyes that see will tell you that Spain remains the better team. The USWNT are under no illusions about this. "All of these things that we're teaching are for this opponent," head coach Emma Hayes told her players Saturday after losing to Spain, 2-0, in the first of two friendlies. "And the reason I say that is because that's our barometer of success."

In the grim darkness of the far future, 40,000 years from now, an immortal corpse-Emperor sits atop his Golden Throne on Earth, watching over the trillions upon trillions of human beings scattered across the galaxy. For ten thousand years, the Emperor hasn’t spoken or moved from that Golden Throne, and those masses of humans are ruled by the Imperium of Man in the Emperor’s name. Their often short existences are spent within the Imperium’s authoritarian systems that value ignorance over knowledge and stasis over change. Human life is cheap, and the Imperium spends it freely on neverending wars with a variety of aliens and the forces of Chaos, which inhabit an alternate dimension known as the Warp. Earth—Terra—is a hellscape, a city-planet packed with so many people that an accurate count is impossible, its oceans long since boiled away and its original surface buried beneath millennia of haphazard construction. The Imperium is a creaking, ramshackle realm where cruelty, hierarchy, and suppression are facts of life. Its greatest warriors, the Space Marines, are genetically altered monstrosities, created through processes that kill more than they successfully manufacture. Technology is controlled by closed-minded zealots who fear nothing more than innovation. Of course, the Imperium has an Inquisition, which roots out heresy of all kinds, and an official church (the Ecclesiarchy) dedicated to unquestioning worship of the Emperor. The aliens—xenos, in the parlance of the universe—are no better. The Orks live only for fighting; the elf-like Aeldari care little for lesser beings; their dark elf Drukharii cousins subsist on torture and pain; the Necrons are living-metal horrors who traded mortal life for soulless immortality tens of millions of years ago; the insectoid Tyranids, controlled by a hive mind, exist solely to consume every bit of biomass in their path; and even the T’au, the newest addition to the galaxy, who value the Greater Good above all, aren’t to be trusted.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Albert answers a question about a child who has become Bible curious.

In terms of things you simply do not want to see happening at the club you support within the first two months of the season, one of your star players blasting the entire organizational hierarchy has to be pretty high up there. That's exactly what's happening at Manchester United, following a brutal start (one win, three draws, two losses, and 13th place) to what was supposed to be an exemplary Premier League season and a listless and frustrating 2-0 defeat Tuesday to Atlético Madrid in the second match day of the Champions League campaign. The locker room is now officially unsettled, as Lisandro Martínez made clear in his postgame interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE3Ux23BNLo That's Martínez, perhaps still in his feelings about a confrontation at the end of the match with his Argentine compatriots on Atleti, blasting United from top to bottom. Of particular note are his quotes directed at technical director Jason Wilcox, whom the center back feels did not do enough to allow United to build on last season's successes: "We did a fantastic season last season and now we expect more from the top, more players to compete because many teams bring many players as well." When asked if he expected more investment in order to bring United to the level of the Champions League and a side like Atlético, Martínez didn't hesitate:

How quickly can the owner of a reigning championship team spend down a sudden windfall of goodwill? James Dolan has spent the NBA offseason exploring that hypothetical, and he appears to be a gifted speedrunner. The owner of the New York Knicks began his work before the job was even done this past June, inviting Donald Trump to Game 3 of the NBA Finals. That wound up being the team's only loss in an otherwise torrid 15-game playoff stretch. Then, at the team's victory parade, mere days after he'd funded the first title in 53 years for a team beloved by America's biggest city, Dolan took the mic and glowered. To cap off an event that united an estimated 2 million fans in communal joy, the team owner used his time in the pulpit to (predictably) take a shot at Mayor Zohran Mamdani and (inexplicably) question the Knicks fandom of parade attendees. "I don't need your vote," he told the fans, for some reason. For all the justified criticisms of Dolan over the years, he has typically been willing to spend his money on the team. A fan could have reasonably expected that an owner who has already spent big on some catastrophic Knicks rosters would happily spend big to return a lucrative, championship-winning roster, even under the current collective bargaining agreement, which punishes high spenders. But this was not the case. Just four days after the Knicks lifted the trophy, Dolan told WFAN that he would not spend into the second apron to keep the team intact. "We're willing to stretch, but there's certain things in the NBA that you'd have to be suicidal to do," he said. "One of them is the second apron."

The American League Championship Series is every bit an American League production, which is to say that it is not for the dilettante, or anything close to an easy watch. It is for people who choose to view sports in their leisure time as penance for past misdeeds rather than as a reward for past service. You don't sit back and enjoy it passively; you may not enjoy it at all. Instead you lean in with clenched fists and teeth in full-lock grind, because this is the business that you and they have chosen, and the aesthetic you and they have embraced. One of these teams is going to play in the World Series, and far more concerning for you lightweights, it could still be the Cleveland Guardians. The AL, you see, is not the Tampa Bay Rays, the perennially competitive team defined by pluck, platooning, and small contracts. Their calling card is more than those low payrolls and zeal for doing the things everyone else dismisses as Little League nonsense. They have been the fourth-best team in the sport over the last two decades, and this may well be their most complete team yet. They win because of their seemingly indomitable pitching, a roster full of opportunistic multi-tool players whose talents mesh delightfully and whose shortcomings somehow do not clump up in unsightly blobs, and perhaps also due to the cool multi-colored Devil Rays jerseys they wear sometimes, which recall their franchise origins, and specifically to the part when religious groups claimed they were honoring Satanic influences and were taken seriously enough that the franchise dropped the Devil for good. They are the best team in the AL, but they are their own thing. The AL this year is actually much closer to Cleveland, a sometimes-hard-to-watch surprise team that really isn't that surprising. They won 13 fewer regular-season games in winning their benighted division but, like Tampa, Cleveland got a first-round bye and all the advantages that come with it. They are in the ALCS after having earned it—inelegantly, perhaps, and in uniforms that hearken back to a time when the only colors in the world were navy blue and red and fonts were something only runty graphic designers understood. But they earned it all the same.

If you watched the Broncos-Chargers game on Sunday, first of all, my apologies. You shouldn’t have had to see that. Second of all, you might have come away from that game saying, “Good Lord, Justin Herbert has gone from being overhyped to being actively shitty!” I can’t blame you for that gut reaction. Herbert’s play has deteriorated to the point where no one would blame that team’s brass for staging a full reset at quarterback. But the bigger story from that game had nothing to do with Herbert or his winless team, but with this fine fella: https://bsky.app/profile/profootballtalk.bsky.social/post/3mxsjm57kyk22 That’s Broncos QB Bo Nix, who led his team to the AFC title game a season ago, seemingly proving to all the haters and losers that he was a viable franchise quarterback. NOT SO FAST, MY FRIEND. Turns out that even with Denver head coach Sean Payton commandeering play-calling duties last week, Nix couldn’t hit an intermediate route if he was playing against air. The metrics have been saying it, and this week’s episode of All Ball helps explains why the tape agrees.

A memo prepared for the Las Vegas Raiders by the recruiting firm Korn Ferry was entered as an exhibit in Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores's ongoing racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams. The memo was unsealed by the court Tuesday, giving the public a rare look at how coaching candidates are evaluated by teams. As it turns out, this particular evaluation was pretty racist. The memo, first reported on by Front Office Sports, contains a list of Flores's strengths and weaknesses, based on Korn Ferry's evaluation of him. There are some harsh things listed under the weaknesses section, including one anonymous team executive calling Flores "the worst hiring decision we’ve ever made." But it is one of Flores's apparent strengths that is likely to be most relevant to his case. Korn Ferry decided to describe Flores this way: Polished and a good presenter despite growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn (same as Mike Tyson). He was able to build a strong friendship with a billionaire's son which gave him opportunities to socialize and learn how to build relationships with white-collar and upper-class individuals.

A jury found former Kansas City and Miami receiver Tyreek Hill liable Tuesday night for two counts of battery in his civil trial. The same Miami jury found him not liable on another five counts of battery, one count of assault, one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress, and one count of continuing domestic violence. The jury awarded Hill's estranged wife, Lakeeta Vaccaro, $500,000 in compensatory damages, but did not award any punitive damages. The trial came about as part of the couple's ongoing divorce in which Vaccaro said Hill physically and verbally abused her during their marriage, including once trying to punch her in the stomach while she was pregnant with their daughter. Hill told jurors that that he did verbally abuse his wife, whom he in turn accused of stealing his money, but the NFL wideout said he did not physically hurt her.