NowLoop

The bulletin board material the Dallas Wings supplied to Cotie McMahon looked more like posterboard material. On Wednesday night, after the Washington Mystics’ 96-92 comeback win over Dallas, the rookie Mystics guard posted a photo of a scouting report the Wings had evidently left behind in their locker room. Like many scouting reports—who can forget Joe Mazzulla’s Quizlet account?—this one featured some good bits of found poetry. Angela Dugalić? “In to space floor/Attack her if she guards you.” Shakira Austin: “Battle her in every way for every minute.” But it did not feature Cotie McMahon. That might explain the 18 points McMahon put up on Wednesday night, 10 of which came in a tense fourth quarter. The Wings led the Mystics by as much as 20 points late in the third, but McMahon got the game back in control by muscling her way downhill and finishing through contact. Austin, the center who finished with 27 points and 13 rebounds, also didn’t seem like she minded being battled in every way for every minute. Wednesday’s was the Mystics' fifth straight win, a streak of success the franchise hasn’t achieved since their championship season in 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLPS6lEl6jI

Both Drew and I can sense when we are overdue for having Rohan Nadkarni on the podcast. In the way that an old prospector's knee might start barking before the storm clouds have even appeared on the horizon, we both feel a twinge when it has been too long between detailed descriptions of various sandwiches and gentle reminders that we are old as hell. It doesn't really matter who sends the text first. In a deeper sense, the universe sends it, and all of us receive it at the same time. Friends, it was time: As always with Rohan episodes, it moved along some strange but soothing currents. Before we got into talking about sports, we discussed our childhood crushes on various goofy infomercial products, awful ice trays we have known, and a young-adult Drew specialty that I described as Minnesota Jambalaya. The sandwich stuff comes early this time: Drew talked about a bunch of seagulls executing a well-designed heist on half of his Italian sub, and Rohan remembered being pickpocketed by a dog named Byron for his work dinner.

Years before he figured it out enough to make his Major League debut on Wednesday night at the age of 29, which in turn was long after his career ended for the first time, you could find coverage of Jefry Yan celebrating otherwise unremarkable strikeouts in wild and demonstrative fashion, in decidedly unremarkable settings. MLB.com posted a supercut of Yan absolutely going the hell off in Dominican Winter League games back in 2024, and similar spring training highlights abounded on team-affiliated social media in 2025. There's a slightly more subdued—this is very much relative—highlight of him striking out the side in a Triple-A game against the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs back in June of this year. When MLB.com's Jack Magruder wrote about Yan in spring of 2025, then-Rockies catcher Jacob Stallings noted, correctly, that "it is pretty well-documented that he's going to get excited, so nobody is going to get surprised by it." He added that Yan was "a good dude." In a feature story about him for ESPN that year, Jeff Passan noted that Yan impressed the woman he would go on to marry with his "effortless dancing" when they met at a Phoenix club back in 2017. At the time, Yan was working as a deliveryman and roofer in the mornings—he was also the subject of a delightful story headlined "Colo. Rockies Pitcher Jefry Yan Won't Give Up A 'Shingle'" at Roofing Contractor Dot Com in spring of 2025—and playing for a local semi-pro team called the Expendables while training to get back into organized baseball in the evenings. Yan had signed with the Angels as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican Republic, got Tommy John surgery before he turned 20, then spent years on the Los Angeles Angels' restricted list after refusing his third assignment to their Dominican baseball complex. Yan's stuff ticked up significantly upon joining the Marlins organization in 2021, after finally being granted his release by the Angels, but not in a way that put him especially close to the bigs. Keith Law gave him a couple of sentences in his Marlins prospect writeup that winter, the last of which aptly summed up the kind of prospect that Yan was at the time, and mostly has been through his career. "He hasn’t thrown a lot of strikes—25 walks in 31 pro innings last year, with 51 strikeouts," Law wrote. "But it’s wow stuff and a hell of a story if he makes it." Yan made it as far as Triple-A in three seasons with the Marlins—he allowed 10 earned runs and issued nine walks in six innings there—before spending a similarly electric and infuriating season in Japan and then another at Triple-A with the Rockies last year.

Some people are fans of the Miami Dolphins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Miami Dolphins. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: "To win games, you have to win the game, not lose the game, honestly. And that, that is how you lose the game." Your 2025 record: 7-10, featuring a 2-7 start that got Dolphins GM Chris Grier fired after 900 years on the job. Everyone assumed that head coach Mike McDaniel, whose act wore thin faster than Sarah Cooper’s, would get the axe shortly thereafter. But in a stunning display of ownership complacency, McDaniel and his fancy watch collection held onto the job till the bitter end, guiding his charges to five wins in their remaining eight games, putting them out of favorable draft position in the process. Awesome. Kickass. Fuck me with a trident. If you recall, the Dolphins were a fun watch right at the beginning of McDaniel’s tenure. They would send five different guys in motion before every snap, and QB Tua Tagovailoa—no longer burdened by having to play for a head coach who actually expected things of him—would get the ball to one of the speed demons populating every skill position group. It was exhilarating while it lasted. The problem is that it lasted for roughly 10 minutes. After that, the whole enterprise took on the sheen of the Jay Fiedler-era Dolphins, only more expensive.

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 preschool 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 last 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?"