NowLoop

You have one last job to do this Monday morning. This week's puzzle was constructed by Madison Shultz, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Madison has too many hobbies. She spends most of her free time skiing, climbing, hiking, and rockhounding, but started constructing crosswords in 2025 as a creative outlet and reason to stay inside more with her two cats. If you like this puzzle, you can find more of her work at her blog Crossword Curiosities. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003 Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48. Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and privacy for anyone else. He hated the idea that the United States ought ever to be constrained by anything other than its own self-interest, as defined exclusively by guys like him. He hated the expectation that the United States would ever project its might with anything less than maximal imperial violence and bloodlust. He hated all of these with blithe good-ol'-boy cheer and the sneer of the frontrunner. He went on The Daily Show a bunch, so that both sides could playact a kind of broadminded comity that the suckers they both held in contempt just lap right up. Guh hyuk hyuk hyuk, isn't it charming how I want all of y'awl dead. For a little while in the aughts and again at intervals Graham played at a kind of shriekingly insincere, cornpone Bible College John McCain act, pretending to part with his party on judicial nominees, on immigration reform, on gun control, on vaccines, when that fake disunity could be performed safely at the "sponsoring a doomed, dead-on-arrival bill" or "going on Meet the Press" stage and abandoned long before anybody had to cast a vote. Like many in his party he pretended to care about decorum and civility when he thought Donald Trump was just a freak novelty act the establishment would eventually crush; like everyone in his party he ditched that pretense as soon as the prediction turned out to be wrong. He spent the last decade of his life letting Donald Trump wear him as a glove and telling himself it was the other way around. It bought him the war with Iran he'd worked for decades to make happen, and he fucked off the mortal coil before he could be made to reckon with it being a failure.

After losing the 2025 Australian Open final, Sascha Zverev was remarkably despondent. The man who defeated him, Jannik Sinner, put both hands on Zverev's shoulders and delivered a pep talk to the sobbing runner-up as the duo awaited the presentation of their trophies. "I think Jannik is better than me at the moment. It's as simple as that," Zverev said in his post-match press conference. "I think I'm serving better than him, but that's it. He does everything else better than me. He moves better than me, he hits his forehand better than me, he hits his backhand better than me, he returns better than me, he volleys better than me." Many players suffer emotionally after losing a Slam final, and for Zverev it was his third time in that unpleasant scenario, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd ever seen a tennis player sound quite so hopeless. Once a teenage prodigy, Zverev had endured the Big Three era only to be leapfrogged by Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. They beat him regularly, scooped up all the Slam titles that Zverev sought, enthralled fans, and played with the kind of relentless aggression that seemed to consistently elude Zverev in the nervy moments of a big match. At one point in April, the ranking points gap between No. 2 Alcaraz and No. 3 Zverev was larger than the gap between No. 3 Zverev and me. Nobody would dispute Zverev's claim that Sinner was a world apart from him. Frustration mounted, and late in the 2025 season, Zverev even speculated that tournament directors were tweaking their court surfaces to favor the Sincaraz duo. He has never been one for subtle grievance. Zverev turned 29 this April and must have felt he was running out of time.After all that heart- and bellyaching, this year Zverev lucked into a Roland-Garros draw unclogged of the tour's three most dangerous players: Sinner (shock loss due to cramps), Alcaraz (wrist injury) and Novak Djokovic (upset by rising star). It was in these somewhat Mickey Mouse circumstances that Zverev, the best of the rest, won his long-awaited first Slam. With that achievement under his belt, a few weeks later he rolled up to Wimbledon, advanced past the fourth round for the first time at the grass-court major, arrived at the final, won the first set in a tiebreak ... and still proceeded to lose to Jannik Sinner, 6-7(7), 7-6(2), 6-4, 6-4, on Sunday. We can grant that Zverev has made appreciable strides, with regard to his forehand and his execution under stress. He still can't yet threaten the regnant duo in men's tennis. This was Sinner's tenth consecutive win over Zverev.Like many a Wimbledon match between top-ranked men, this final was characterized by quick points and serve dominance. These are two of the best serves on tour, though the players come by it differently. Zverev, at 6-foot-6, has the stereotypical stature of a flamethrower. The distinctive feature of his serve is his ability to maintain high heat while still getting the bulk of first serves into play. Over the last 52 weeks he's gotten a tour-best 72.5 percent of first serves in, which is outrageous considering how hard he's hitting them. Meanwhile, Sinner, who is three inches shorter and has continually tinkered with his service motion over the past few years, has devised one of the most accurate deliveries on tour. He first serves stay perilously close to the lines of the service box, best visualized in this graphic by Matt Willis, and these days he can crank it up to 130 mph with some regularity.Back in 2022, his serve was mediocre, and he had to really toil from the baseline. By 2024, his serve was excellent. In 2026, it might be heading to historically good territory. Once a groundstroke merchant, Sinner is now inching towards servebothood. That's a joke, mostly, but the serve has indeed solved patches of the season when his baseline game has looked scraggly. That includes the first few rounds of this Wimbledon run, too, including his mystifying five-setter against Miomir Kecmanovic in the first round. The typically unshakable Sinner forehand has faltered. But when all aspects of his game are humming, as they were in the last stretch of Sunday's final, he is impossible to cope with. I agree with Willis's claim that we've never quite seen this quality of serve fused to this quality of ball-striking. That unholy combination will win him many titles on fast surfaces, and it is exactly what bedeviled Zverev today. Both players were unbroken in the first two sets, which they split in tiebreaks. It took Zverev 2 hours and 42 minutes to locate his first (and only) break point, which arrived in at 3-3 in the third set. On that pivotal point, Sinner came up with a drop shot that caused Zverev to slip, fall, and clutch at his knee; he walked across the court to help his opponent up from the turf. Sinner then held serve, got the first break of the entire match, and served out the third set.

It was Sunday night in Los Angeles and streets of the city legendary for its traffic sat empty. Even Trader Joe's—the beloved grocery chain known as much for its tiny parking lots as its low prices—had plenty of spaces. For once, as the Clueless joke goes, you really could get anywhere in LA in 20 minutes. The reason? Mexico was playing England. In the World Cup. In the knockout rounds. In the vaunted home of El Tri, Estadio Azteca. Well before I arrived at my local soccer bar, an hour before kickoff, I had resigned myself to being among those who had to stand outside. As I positioned myself the best I could for a view of the TVs, just another person clad in the signature green, white, and red of El Tri, I announced to no one in particular, "Oh thank God, the television is on Telemundo." I have been far from alone in this sentiment. For the Mexico match, Variety reported that 21.7 million people watched on Fox—while an even larger 23.2 million watched on Telemundo. More than half of the total audience watched the broadcast in Spanish.

The master plan is clear to anyone with eyes. FIFA rigged the World Cup draw so Argentina would become the first team to make the semis without playing a side ranked in the top 15. FIFA has rigged every match in favor of Argentina. FIFA demanded that the VAR take away Egypt's second goal over a much-delayed foul call. In that same match, FIFA instructed the referees to not call a foul by Argentina's Julián Alvarez on Mohammed Salah. FIFA even put an all-Argentine referee crew on the France-Morocco match. And, during Saturday night's quarter-final against Switzerland, FIFA pulled out the big guns, rigging the game in Argentina's favor by forcing Breel Embolo to commit the single stupidest dive I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ttdGtk8eGI

For all of its defensive solidity and possession dominance, Spain has been missing a finishing touch in this World Cup. It hurt the Spaniards in the opening match, the stunning draw to Cape Verde. It made them struggle against Uruguay in an ugly game on the final day of the group stage. The 3-0 romp against over-matched Austria felt like a turning point, but then the dreadful viewing on display in the team's 1-0 victory in the round of 16 over Portugal felt like a regression to the mean. Friday's quarterfinal against a hobbled Belgium was more of the same: A lot of possession, some decent chances, and little to show for it. Then, just as he did in the dying embers of the Portugal match, Mikel Merino showed up and scored Spain into the next round. Not bad for a player who was, for most of his career, nominally a defensive midfielder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRiB7fpsl8Q

BERGERAC, France — The 2026 Tour de France is thus far mostly bereft of big narratives and interesting surprises. The race for the first two podium places seems mostly over. There is no off-bike story that's captivated the race or raised larger-order implications like the saga of Ineos soigneur David Rozman's doping connections. Torstein Træn delighted the race and threatened to upend the back half of the top-10 fight, only to crack on the Tourmalet before falling on the descent and breaking a quartet of his ribs. However, there is still one major piece of intrigue. What the hell is going on with the public spat between the two biggest stars at Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe? The drama kicked off after Stage 6, in which Tadej Pogacar smashed the Tourmalet climbing and descending records en route to a dominant solo stage win and the likely permanent seizure of the yellow jersey. Behind him, Jonas Vingegaard rode in solo for second, and a six-rider pack of contenders for the final podium spot sprinted it out. The finishing sextet featured two pairs of teammates, the stronger of which is Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz, who finished fourth and sixth on the day, respectively. They came into the Tour as co-leaders, a bad idea in general and a particularly nonsensical one for this pair.

Is Plato’s Republic too gay?   This is one of many brave questions posed by the Texas Tech University System’s chancellor and Board of Regents as they implement an “extraordinary system of censorship in higher education,” according to a new lawsuit filed Wednesday in Texas federal court by faculty unions. The American Association of University Professors and the Texas AAUP-AFT said that Texas Tech is violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments by way of sweeping new restrictions on academic freedom.    The Texas Tech University System collectively serves about 64,000 students, and is one of only nine in the country offering programs that span undergraduate, medical, law, nursing, pharmacy, dental, and veterinary education. That’s a lot of curricula to rid of "content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex," "endorsement of a gender spectrum," and suggestions that "meritocracy or a strong work ethic are inherently racist"! Thankfully, university system Chancellor Brandon Creighton said Texas Tech built an AI tool to scan syllabi, reading materials, and lesson plans for censor-worthy material. 

Cheri Kempf knows exactly how hard it is to sustain a professional women’s sports league. She was the commissioner of the now-defunct National Pro Fastpitch league. During her tenure, the NPF’s league office had two full-time employees, one of whom was Kempf. It launched in 2004 and went through rounds of expansion and contraction, but didn’t have the television contracts or budget to sustain itself long-term. When the COVID-19 pandemic came and canceled the 2020 and 2021 seasons, the league folded. It was around this time that she received a call from Jon Patricof, the co-founder and CEO of Athletes Unlimited, an organization founded in 2020 that has been attempting to establish pro women’s leagues across various sports. Patricof reached out to Kempf for her expertise, and right away she could tell that Athletes Unlimited had advantages that the NPF never did.    “That included it having the financial structure behind all of that as the foundation, so that is something that professional softball in this country has never seen, certainly to that degree,” said Kempf, who is now the AUSL’s chief broadcast officer and executive producer. “The NPF really was just a fraction of any of that, in terms of budget and league office and enablement.”

Norway's charmed and charming run to the World Cup quarterfinals has been a good time all around. Erling Haaland is probably the most lovingly memed man on Earth at the moment, and with good reason. The Norwegians are getting really into cowboy fashion. It's all very fun. They seem like a fun hang. And they are rowing. They are rowing after wins. They are rowing in Times Square. They are rowing up the escalator. The Viking Row is the breakout celebration of this Cup, with supporters joining the team after victories in a metronomic pantomime of their ancestors crossing the storm-toss'd seas, possibly to raid some abbey or other. But after Norway's victory over Senegal in the group stage, a photo went viral showing one lone Norway fan refusing to put his back into the oar. Emil Anners Lappen refuses to row! He simply will not. In the silly season of World Cup human interest stories, this has made Emil famous. The news is covering him in his home country. They're covering him in Sweden. And now, ahead of England's final-eight match against Norway, Emil has finally been interviewed in English, by Sky News. https://twitter.com/skynews/status/2075338675114684690