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A little over three years ago, the greatest chess player of all-time lost to a swaggering young American grandmaster, self-ejected from an important tournament, and kicked off the biggest and strangest cheating scandal chess has ever seen. The story of Magnus Carlsen's quixotic war against Hans Niemann gripped the chess world for years. Back in 2022, Carlsen was on top of the world, lording over every format of chess and winning most major tournaments even after announcing his plans to abdicate his world championship. Niemann, meanwhile, was the hungry upstart, eager to make a name for himself. Their divergent personalities animated the story, but so did the unsolvable mystery at its heart. We now know so much about Niemann's destructive personality and alienation from the very chess world he sought to ascend within, as we do about his history of cheating online and the way Carlsen had slowly been annoyed by chess to the point that he finally snapped. But did Niemann cheat when he beat Carlsen with the black pieces at the Sinquefield Cup in 2022? That's the question at the center of this week's episode of Only If You Get Caught, and it might be the hardest one to answer. There was also the totally sensationalized and misleading theory that Niemann was using anal beads to cheat, which is many peoples' point of entry into the story.

For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the churn. When we first meet J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) at the start of The Mastermind, he appears firmly in the latter category. A family man and a carpenter with a house in the Boston suburbs, J.B. seems merely to have fallen on hard times. It’s 1970, he’s unemployed, and the U.S. is preparing a ground invasion of Cambodia. Not that any of this seems to bother him much. Instead, he spends a lot of time at the Framingham Museum of Art, circling a gallery of abstract paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove.  Yet as indicated by the title (and Rob Mazurek’s propulsive jazz score) J.B. has considerably more on his mind. The Mastermind is not Reichardt’s first heist caper—by my count, it’s her fourth—but it begins as her most direct. J.B. wants those Dove paintings, and after weeks spent casing the joint, he’s assembled a crack team to get them. Just kidding; we’re talking about a Kelly Reichardt film here. The heist itself is little more than a smash and grab, pulled off by a group of townie deadbeats, with an unwitting assist from J.B.’s wife Terri (Alana Haim), and unknowingly funded by his mother (Hope Davis). That it ends with all the paintings safely stored in his attic is false consolation. This is America; of course things don’t work out for the little guy. 

La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas and U.S.-based sports promoter Relevent, the scheme to bring real blood-on-the-grass Iberian club soccer to America was hated by pretty much everyone else associated with it at a professional level in Spain. Supporter groups were unrelenting in their criticism of the idea. Barcelona manager Hansi Flick repeatedly expressed his displeasure at the prospect of having to travel almost 5,000 miles for the match, which would be a clear drain on his squad’s energy in the middle of a hectic season. Players from all teams across the league staged several on- and off-field protests in opposition to the plan.  Even UEFA, hardly a body hostile to the cause of European club football’s crass commercialization, was opposed, only agreeing to the plan “reluctantly” as a compromise to avoid the possibility of a legal showdown with Relevent—and to give itself time to plug gaps in the regulatory framework that allow schemes to play overseas to occupy, for now at least, a kind of legal penumbra. “League matches should be played on home soil; anything else would disenfranchise loyal match-going fans and potentially introduce distortive elements in competitions,” UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin observed, correctly, while announcing his organization’s approval of the game. The hope, clearly, was that by sternly registering its distaste, UEFA would be able to stigmatize the organization of further European league games overseas. In the case of the Villarreal-Barcelona game, that seems to have worked. The cancellation of Villarreal-Barcelona represents the fourth time since 2018 that La Liga has tried—and failed—to hold a match in the U.S. So, disaster averted? Not quite.

At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It's a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a danger. A world in which you will always need a gun, and to shoot somebody with it, instead of just lusting for both. Because the world isn't actually like that—because, in general, people are just people, and mostly want to live peaceably and get along with each other—most American conservatives must mainline Fox News (or Newsmax, or whatever) directly to their brains at all hours in order to remain within the fantasy that both sustains and degrades them. In this respect, Dick Cheney got luckier than most American right-wingers could ever dream. Fanatics with brown skin crashed commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, at a time when, as vice president under the harebrained and banally evil George W. Bush, Cheney for all practical purposes ran the most lethal death-dealing apparatus in the history of the world. He got to spend seven years deciding who the bad guys were and how to kill them. He got to scrawl the simplest possible moral calculus across the world in blood. He lived the dream.

This World Series ended the only way it could, which was frenzied and late. The clocks turned back just a few hours after that; the next day was in another season, shorter and darker. The day after that, basically every MLB player eligible to do so, with all due respect to Tyler O'Neill, opted for free agency. It was instantly and overwhelmingly the offseason, and where once there had been a baseball season there was another sunny parade in Los Angeles, the spectacle of a sauced and puffy Blake Snell saying "6-7" on a stage 31 days before his 33rd birthday, and a sun that was already on the way down again. Soon, and for some time, there will be nothing left of baseball but Discourse. A World Series as great as the one that ended over the weekend throws off enough light to reveal the relative shabbiness and artifice of its staging; the things that it was supposed to Be About naturally look small and dull relative to what it actually was. Before the National League Championship Series, the matchup between the Dodgers and Brewers was framed as a battle for baseball's future. The Dodgers are rich and spend a lot of money, and so stood for a future that was comparatively cold and small for how readily it could be bought; the Brewers won 97 games in simultaneously confounding and convincing fashion with a roster of players available on the waiver wires of most 10-team fantasy leagues, and so were the avatar for the belief that anything really could happen, up to and including a team of Caleb Durbins and Sal Frelicks really could add up to much more than the sum of those humble and inexpensive parts. It's not a complicated binary. It's more or less the grim inevitability of what can be bought against the unquantifiable possibility of everything that exists outside of that.

The New Orleans Pelicans are 0-6 to start the season. Of those six losses, three have been by at least 30 points. No team in NBA history has accumulated three 30-point losses this early in a season. The Pelicans rank 27th in offensive rating and 29th in defensive rating. They are playing "an unserious brand of basketball," longtime Pelicans reporter Will Guillory decreed Sunday evening. The players "seem to have given up on" head coach Willie Green, per Rod Walker at NOLA.com, who wondered if the coach's time was up. Green, the coach since 2021 and a holdover from a previous front-office regime, nevertheless kept his job during the offseason, which would have been the most natural time to replace him.

One of the underrated aspects of the last few years of Miami football is that, with the decline of UF and Florida State, the Hurricanes have in-state recruiting locked down. For the most part, this has paid dividends. Miami regularly boasts a slew of first-round NFL talent on both sides of the ball, and those players have driven this new era of Miami football. After an excellent couple months to start the season, hopes were high that The U might really be The U again. But now that November is here, they've reverted to type, getting themselves in position for something great only to blow it. Even in these respectable years, Miami can't quite get over the hump. Or even the hump before the hump. On Saturday, Miami lost another game to an ACC opponent—this time, SMU—that they were expected to beat by nearly two touchdowns. To SMU's credit, Rhett Lashlee has made this team a tough out, and unlike Miami, they've been to a playoff before. But after a dramatic loss to Louisville a couple weeks back, Miami needed a flawless end to the regular season in order to control their playoff destiny. The fact that they now have two losses on their record, and very well could lose more, means Miami's playoff chances are starting to circle the drain.

Eleven years ago, when I was a college sophomore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I made an impromptu drive to Detroit with four friends for the express purpose of seeing Max Scherzer. It was his final home start as a Tiger, and while I'd be lying if I said I remembered much of the game itself—I have a sharper recall of learning in the parking lot that Derek Jeter had walked it off in his last Yankee Stadium AB—what sticks with me most is that we'd made the effort. And somewhere along the line, I bound myself to Scherzer for the remainder of his career, even as that career took him out of Detroit. He would leave in free agency for the Nationals. A 2014 playoff blowout at the hands of the Orioles and an ensuing three-game sweep would be the final playoff series for the Tigers for a decade. The last time I saw him, and the last time my hometown team was good, were tied together in my brain.

So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cardinals-Cowboys Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not taking Jayden Daniels out of last night's lost cause of a Seahawks-Commanders game. It is a rare point of consensus in a season that has mostly been unsettled and uneasy—it is indeed suboptimal to have your starting quarterback/franchise future mangle his elbow trying to make a play he doesn't need to make late in a game his team is losing by four and a half scores. But that's the only thing on which there is anything remotely close to universal agreement; everything else in this year's NFL can be considered day-to-day and highly questionable. Baseball fans can snark away in the direction of their Dodgers-shaped straw man, basketball fans can opt in to All Wemby All The Time, and college football will always be able to find that get-your-ass-off-our-campus energy every Saturday, but the NFL has no galvanizing player or team at this moment. The best teams are all vulnerable, and not just because the odd coach will occasionally forget that there aren't any 32-point plays.

Manchester City has five players who have scored exactly one goal this Premier League season: Matheus Nunes, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Tijjani Reijnders, and Nico O'Reilly. That makes for a five-way tie for third-most goals for the club, behind Burnley's Maxime Estève, whose two own goals on Sep. 27 rank second on the Manchester City Goal Sources Rankings. In first place? That would be Erling Haaland, whose 13 goals are far and away not just the most on Manchester City, but more than double the next highest mark in the Premier League (Brentford's Igor Thiago, Brighton's Danny Welbeck, Bournemouth's Antoine Semenyo, and Crystal Palace's Jean-Philippe Mateta are all tied for second with six goals each). Haaland has been pretty much the entire Manchester City attack, as he demonstrated again with a 16-minute brace on Sunday against Bournemouth in City's 3-1 win, which helped the club keep within range of high-flying Arsenal at the top of the league.