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We'll start with the most significant play of the 2026 MLB All-Star Game: a hit batsman. In the top of the third, with a man on first and the AL already leading 3-0, Tampa's Junior Caminero got smacked on the hand by a 98-mph pitch from St. Louis's Riley O’Brien. Caminero was replaced by a pinch runner as he left to get X-rays, and immediately the day's earlier news that the owners would try to force players to participate in the 2028 Olympics looked even more ridiculous. While Caminero's examination yielded relief, indicating he should be able to play for the Rays on Friday, the wait for that announcement dampened what was already an alternately dull and maudlin atmosphere in Philadelphia, where scores of empty seats were visible on the broadcast before the AL finished off their 4-0 win. Sometimes a baseball game just isn't exciting. That's always going to be an inherent risk. But Tuesday night didn't do itself any favors with its mid-game musical breaks, which made for an exhaustively self-serious affair. They stopped for a recording of Ray Charles's "America The Beautiful," which Jennifer Hudson had already performed in the pregame, then later broke for Boyz II Men to do “I’ll Be There” as part of Mastercard's anti-cancer ad, and still we had to sit through "God Bless America." America 250 is ostensibly a birthday party, but birthday parties are supposed to be upbeat and fun. It felt like MLB was throwing a wake. At least we'll always have the goofy incongruity of Ernie Clement, in a jersey that says "Toronto," signing a Declaration of Independence–looking document as part of the starting lineup announcements. Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images

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, Drew talks about danger.

Having sat with Spain's 2-0 victory over France in the World Cup semifinal for several hours now, I am left with an overwhelming sense of relief. Not because Spain won or France lost, but because the game's second goal was as beautiful as it was. Whether or not you watched the game, you need to do yourself a favor and watch this goal several more times before the day is done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBOIka9sXlQ

This past Friday in Vegas, while many players were in town for NBA Summer League action, Miami Heat big man Bam Adebayo got in some kind of fight with his recently departed teammate Tyler Herro. In last month's trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Heat sent Herro to the Milwaukee Bucks, ending his seven-year stint alongside Adebayo. The fight between them took place in the morning, in a practice court at a hotel; later that day but before news broke of the fight, Herro said in an interview that "it's all love" with his former team. As with any event described by the NBA media, the details of this story took on many forms and involved many imperfect synonyms. So what exactly happened in last weekend's scuffle? That depends on who you ask. ESPN's Shams Charania, who broke the story, put it like this:

Lindsey Graham's sudden death has elicited plenty of nauseating remembrances from his colleagues in the Senate, none of whom seemed to be all that ashamed to speak and write warmly about a guy whose life's work was bigotry and warmongering. But no tribute has been as bone-chilling as the one offered up Monday night by Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker. Here's how Parker decided to remember the man she used to cover while working for The New York Times: Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics, I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite… I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the NYT when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened in Charleston. It was summer, but I was wearing pants and a sweater that day because it was always SO freezing in the Capitol. Anyhow, news of the shooting came down, and the DC Bureau chief called me with an order: Get yourself to Charleston ASAP and glue yourself to Graham’s side. She wanted a piece on the senator grappling with the unimaginable. So I headed straight to the airport, arriving in Charleston with just my backpack and what I’d be wearing to work that day, and linked up with Graham. He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours. And he looked at me, with amused distaste, and said: “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” (He was not wrong; I was sweaty and gross). So I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him, resulting in this piece (which, for reasons not worth getting into, ended up being fairly different than the original assignment).

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about dipping pizza crust, worst great athletes, wheelchair envy, and more. Your letters: Charlie:

In the movie Citizen Vigilante, the latest Uwe Boll provocation that's gaining attention from the far-right side of the internet, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, an American vigilante righting the wrongs of Europe's woke and broken criminal justice system. Why an American has deemed himself worthy of this task, let's not ask that question ... or too many others. When he's not out patrolling the streets, Sanders makes his living as a landlord. One sequence of scenes shows Sanders in one moment mounting a one-man assault on an entire police force, and in the next he's having a meeting with the staff of his real estate business to get a rundown on his properties. There's something so rich about making the hero/antihero of your vigilante fantasy not just a murderous do-gooder, but a landlord to boot. I could forgive, and maybe get into, Sanders's gratuitous killing, but I cannot abide landlording. Even the creators of Batman knew to make the source of his wealth vague enough to not get in the way of the fantasy. Maybe it is irresponsible of me to describe Citizen Vigilante as a "fantasy." I don't know that that's totally what is going on here. The movie tells the story of an American military expat (maybe? unclear?) living in "Europe" (apparently Croatia?) who, in between his landlord duties, decides to take the law into his hands after watching the city he has immigrated to fall into disarray at the hands of the wrong kinds of migrants. Citizen Vigilante opens with a nice blonde woman taking her adorable white child to the grocery store. Unfortunately, her walk through this dangerously sunny neighborhood takes her past a sketchy building, which you know is sketchy because it has some graffiti on it. As she passes, a knife-wielding black migrant gruesomely stabs her in the neck, then runs away while making ooga-booga sounds. We know this particular black stabber is a migrant because the next scene features a news segment which helpfully points out the killer's immigration status, amongst other bits of exposition. The newscaster then posits that, with all this migrant-fueled crime, what might be needed is a mysterious vigilante to come around offering the kind of justice that the legal system cannot. You know, like how they typically talk on the news. This opening is meant to set a scary and upsetting tone, which it maybe would have if it weren't all so shoddily made, devoid of tension or pacing or suspense.

Grab a stool, take a seat, and get ready to learn about cyclospora.

Is there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? Give me all of them: your Künstlerromans, your campus novels, your NYCs, your MFAs. I didn’t go to Iowa, but I’ve read so many recollections of the program that sometimes I think I might have. The pleasures of the genre arise in part from how its entrants play with certain tropes: the struggle to find one’s voice, the anxiety of influence, the labor of constructing an identity, the implicit resolution promised by the book the reader holds in their hands. A key figure in this artistic coming-of-age is the charismatic teacher. The writing teacher is both a vision of a possible future and that future’s arbiter; maybe the first authority to give—or withhold—permission for the student to keep going. The stakes of their pleasure or displeasure are high. This can make it easy to confuse the aim of the class—to write good sentences—with the teacher’s gratification. A good teacher, writes Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex, will get out in front of this confusion, seizing a student’s desire and rerouting it toward its proper object: their education. You could fill a bookshelf with examples where that redirection fails, and the ensuing lessons confer an aesthetic and moral education of an entirely different kind. Julie Buntin’s sophomore novel, Famous Men, is an audacious entry into this canon. The narrator is Wilhelmina (Will) Miles, a budding writer from Greening, a fictional town in Northern Michigan. Greening’s best-known export is the “great American writer” Nathaniel Fellow, who teaches at a prestigious MFA program in New York. When Will discovers his poetry at 14, it dilates her sense of what life and art might look like. In Greening of the early aughts, a world of snow and skinned deer, of “raw-eyed fathers and their identical boys,” she feels constrained—by tensions with her mother; her mother’s predatory boyfriend; a high-school rumor that dogs her after a party; her longing for proximity to art. Her hunger to escape takes Nathaniel as its object—not just his work, but the chance that he might be the father whose identity her mother has never revealed. By the time she finally makes it to his doorstep in her early 20s, his influence and her artistic formation have been intertwined for a substantial portion of her life.

AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France the most competitive sleep environment in sports? "Probably, yeah," answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost's Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every day for nearly a month, and they spend almost every night at a different hotel. There are only two days off, so they must recover from one day's effort before the next day's racing starts the next morning. If you don't sleep, you can't race. One of Greenwell's primary responsibilities at the Tour is making sure the riders are getting enough high-quality sleep every night. On the first rest day of the Tour de France, I caught up with him and Walid Karim, an EF staffer responsible for assembling the team's sleep apparatuses, because I wanted to know how they managed it. Sleep is a whole-day effort, and EF uses some bed technology I'd never heard of before that seems extremely effective. Last year, a staffer told me they averaged over eight hours and 15 minutes of sleep, per rider, per night. The attention given to somnial matters has increased drastically in the recent past. Greenwell joined the team 10 years ago, after stints with Great Britain's Olympic swimming and triathlon programs, and his time in the sport is contemporary with the sleep revolution. "Basically, you just had what you were given," he said of the way things were done when he joined, describing "typical French hotels with these long bolster pillows, that are just so uncomfortable."