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As the pure elation began to ebb, the feeling that overcame me toward the end of the USMNT's demolition of Paraguay in its World Cup opener last week was disbelief. I found it genuinely confusing. The United States men's soccer team simply does not play with as much overpowering quality, as much one-way domination, as much undeniable impressiveness as we saw that day. For the better part of a decade now, as the largest and most promising cohort of American players made their way to Europe to test themselves in the sport's fiercest crucibles, fans of American soccer have put our faith in the idea that a new day was not only possible, but could even be glimpsed out on the horizon. The thinking went that some day soon, the USMNT would be capable of passages of play, game-long performances, and ultimately tournament outcomes that would've been unfathomable before. As the years wore on, the U.S. did in fact produce better players in greater numbers, who'd all proven their talent more definitively at the highest levels of the club game. And yet, material improvements on the national level were hard to come by—so much so that I at least began to doubt the future vision I'd once thought was imminent. That's what made the Paraguay game so thrilling and so dumbfounding. Just when I'd started giving up hope, the day that had been promised finally arrived. As certain as one might've been that the Paraguay performance was no fluke, and therefore deserved to be celebrated in its own right as a new high-water mark in American men's soccer, I do have to give a (TINY) bit of credit to Defector's beloved curmudgeon Ray "The World's No. 1 Christian Pulisic Fanboy" Ratto, who's main thought in the aftermath of the USMNT's tourney debut was essentially "Eh, let's see them do it again." It is true that to really make good on the realized promise of the Paraguay match, the U.S. would have to turn it into something more. Australia would surely pose at the very least different sorts of problems than the ones the Americans solved with such aplomb against Paraguay, making it a good and important follow-up test. And while the USMNT's performance against the Aussies in Friday's match wasn't nearly as dazzling as the previous game, I do think they showed enough in the 2-0 victory to keep American fans believing that the Paraguay game was not just a blip, but the start of something.

I got got by Connections this week. This is a rare occurrence, because I have a big strong brain that can make distinctions that other brains often cannot. So when I lose Connections, I feel great shame. I have disgraced not only my own legacy, but that of my family's as well. I did not live up to my standard playing Connections, and that will haunt me for a good long time, maybe even into lunch today. So what the fuck are you, The New York Times games app, to tell me this shit? PICTURED: A lie.

The most haunting entry in Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, a recently published anthology edited by Rachel Meade Smith, is also the most vulnerable: a collection of emails between games journalist and author David Wolinsky and anyone who can possibly help him find work. The tone and tenor of the missives will feel instantly familiar to readers who have ever found themselves in a similar position. In the messages, Wolinsky is eager, kind, honest about his situation and what he's willing to do and, most importantly, open to opportunity, however it may present itself. Reading through the entries, which are sprinkled throughout the collection's essays, graphics, and other ephemera, it's clear that the process of how we find work is broken. Wolinsky sends many followups that never waver in their tone—unflinchingly polite and casual with just enough urgency to show that he cares—toeing the line between follow-through and desperation. What Wolinsky, and the other contributors to the book, are really looking for is humanity and connection, two components that are, in 2026, absolutely necessary to a successful job search and seemingly in short supply. Looking for work has always been tough, but in 2026 it feels abysmal. It is a daily humiliation ritual. Toggling back and forth between job boards, cover letters, and four different versions of your own résumé, tailored specifically to listings that may not even be real, tests your own fortitude and tolerance for pain. The slog of seeking employment—looking at your email, closing your email, refreshing it, repeat—is its own kind of labor that is only rewarded when you achieve what feels impossible, which is getting a fucking job.

Hopefully you, like us, have the day off today. And hopefully you, like us, have plans to watch lots of World Cup soccer this weekend. While you do that, feel free to chat away in this open thread.

John Early has one of the most expressive faces of any actor working today. You've almost certainly seen it. The 38-year-old comedian, born and raised in Nashville, has had many small breaks into the zeitgeist over the past decade or so. His voice might also be familiar to you: He's worked on a gamut of animated shows including Bob's Burgers, Tuca & Bertie, The Great North, and Summer Camp Island (a personal favorite). He appeared most recently and prominently in the A24 comedy Eternity, but also in Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave, Julio Torres' Los Espookys, and the wildly underrated HBO series Search Party. It's this latter show where I first saw Early, not by actually watching an episode, but from clips circulating on Twitter.  Indeed, this is how I came to be familiar with several of Early's peers, alt comedians like Jo Firestone, Patti Harrison, and Conner O'Malley, whose brilliant, keenly observed work seems to live timelessly on the internet. But Early has always communicated an old soul, duly inspired by his friends and colleagues, but also the movement and spectacle of Bob Fosse, the  melodrama of cult classics like Showgirls, and, as evidenced by his directorial debut masterpiece, '80s TV movies like Kate's Secret.  Early's film, Maddie's Secret, is not a retelling of that 1986 film, which follows a bulimic woman as she faces pressures both familial and psychological, though there are commonalities: a blonde lead, an eating disorder, the anxiety of a life lived under scrutiny. But Maddie's Secret is something entirely unique and surprisingly moving, a melodrama following the eponymous Maddie (Early), a dishwasher at the fictional Conde Nast magazine Gourmaybe, who is one day thrown into the spotlight when a video of one of her homemade dishes goes viral. As her fame increases, so does the burden of keeping Maddie's harrowing past trauma, and the eating disorder that manifests because of it, at bay. In Maddie's Secret, comedy and severity go hand in hand. Humor lives alongside and within the very real drama performed and staged by Early and his longtime professional partner, Kate Berlant. Maddie's Secret showcases not only Early's many talents as a performer, but his instincts as a filmmaker, one deeply attuned to the inner lives of women in friendship and in crisis.

Money can't buy happiness, and it seems money plus an NBA title doesn't necessarily buy charisma. The New York Knicks held their championship parade and rally in Manhattan on Thursday, and although not everyone could get in to see the actual procession, there were plenty of fans celebrating in the area. Last week's good vibes kept rolling; Jerome "Junkyard Dog" Williams was in attendance. But for a moment, the ceremony at City Hall functioned as an inescapable reminder that James Dolan owns this team, and that means he gets some mic time whenever they appear as a group to celebrate their triumph. In less than two minutes, he was able to briefly derail the festivities like a heinous fart at happy hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE0zd5IpfAw Dolan began his remarks with a comment about the younger Knicks fans in the crowd, but because he can't deliver a line, it came off as a weird dig about their sincere love for the team. "Thank you for waiting 53 years, although I have to say: When I look out over the Knick fans here, you all don't look older than 53 years," he said. "Some of you weren't waiting 53—you weren't born yet. But we're very, very happy to have brought you a championship." Is it their fault for not being born earlier?

There's no sense in dancing around it: The sports vibes are pretty damn good at the moment. New Yorkers celebrated a long-awaited championship in the streets with a minimum of property damage and a surfeit of giddiness. The World Cup is already attempting to redeem its shameful and odious origins by delivering some of the most potent sports spectacle on Earth, and communities of all kinds are rallying around the spirited overage of it all. The positive vibrations that emanate from groups of good-natured people getting together to do fun stuff are overwhelming, so much so that Drew and I knew what we needed to do. We needed to get Ray Ratto on the podcast to straighten this shit out, and quickly. It is not a well-kept secret that Ray, for all his gruffness and singular knack for compound literary burns, is an incredibly kind and pleasant human being, and even he has not been immune to the happy surprises that this World Cup has already delivered in bulk. But we eased into things on the grumpy end of the pool, with a discussion of The Alexis Lalas Experience, which is already threatening to tip over Fox's World Cup studio show under the weight of its smirking villain's thudding trollishness. We would return to soccer later in the show, but beginning with some familiar annoyances helped to level-set nicely.

The concept of "1966" is purely theoretical for almost anyone who wasn't alive then, 60 years of human history separating us from that singular point in time. Sure, the point of history as a field is to educate us about what was happening in, say, 1966, but I barely remember what it felt like to live through most of the years I've been around for, let alone those that came so long before. However, there is one subset of people who might soon get a taste of what 1966 was like, and that is fans of England, who have been waiting since then to lift the World Cup trophy a second time. Folks, it might be coming home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5df9Pm1iFtQ

When Bryson DeChambeau tees off at the U.S. Open this afternoon, he will be doing so with the future bearing down on him. The LIV Golf Tour is about to lose its funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which means that DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and the rest of the former PGA greats who defected to LIV will soon have a decision to make: Do they come crawling back to the PGA, or find new day jobs? DeChambeau’s options may be more limited than Rahm’s or Brooks Koepka’s, who has already begun his journey back at the bottom of the PGA Tour. That’s because DeChambeau is more or less the face of LIV Golf, and was happy to be something of an ambassador for the tour as it courted a right-wing fanbase and established itself as a culture-war front. A return to the PGA Tour would require DeChambeau to eat a lot of shit, and so far he doesn’t seem willing to do that. “I think there’s a way to solve any problem,” DeChambeau said last month, when asked if he would consider returning to the PGA. “It’s really about if the membership wants me back.” Given his recent play, there’s no urgent reason for the PGA Tour to want DeChambeau back. At the Masters in April, he missed the cut with a brutal triple-bogey on the final hole of the second round, unable to extricate himself from a greenside bunker. He lost 2.5 strokes to the field over those two rounds, in line with senior golfer Zach Johnson. The next month, at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, Bryson slapped it around the course and whined about his irons for two days before again missing the cut. Again he lost about 2.5 strokes to the field, a little worse than senior golfer Stewart Cink. 

In the era of looksmaxxing, plastic surgery, Botox, and Ozempic, it's impossible to escape the tyranny of good looks. Are beauty standards fascist? Is losing weight about giving in or being healthy? The endless overdetermined debates about the ethics of aesthetics continues to haunt us. Even as we chase Kant's sublime through facial symmetry, we struggle to justify and categorize the various forms of body modification and whether or not they are feminist. In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang wades into the culture wars with her own fictional take on facelifts, race, and desirability.  While trapped in a toxic mother-daughter dynamic, Linli Feng and her mother Fanny fall prey to a black-market plastic surgery ring. Fanny, a Chinese immigrant struggling to make rent, continues to get botched procedures in a failed bid for beauty, chasing after an imagined white-centered ideal. Linli, meanwhile, hopes to escape her mother's manipulative grasp in Los Angeles and go to graduate school in New York, but her mother continually sabotages her attempts to escape. Instead, Linli ends up taking care of Fanny after yet another dismal surgery. Soon, Fanny cooks up a plan to appear on a new reality TV show: America's Beauty Extreme. If she wins, she'll get the grotesque work on her face fixed. Meanwhile, Linli ends up working at Another Horizon, an abolitionist rehabilitation center as a way to pay her family's creditors. But she soon discovers the botched surgeries her mother receives may be a malicious attempt to weasel money out of poor immigrants looking for a cheap beauty fix. Like mother, like daughter, Linli ends up getting some whitening treatments in an attempt to nail down the shadowy gang who preyed on her mom. It's a packed novel that moves briskly in about 300 pages, full of politically minded plotlines about identity, class, and ICE raids.