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James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade.  The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists. Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled "Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities." The piece went into detail about the owner's fetish for keeping tabs on many of the Garden's famous visitors.

There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate, that May interview was "testy," and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team's stupid Pride Night meltdown. So his return to the show Thursday was a bit of a delicate matter. It did not go well. Posey is a huge drag on the radio. The Giants stink, and as the architect of this mess, Posey is probably not in a great mood these days. What's particularly deflating is his way of inflecting his voice so that it sounds like he's just speaking plain truths, just being square with you, and then you listen closely to what he's saying and there's just nothing of substance to it. It's like listening to a lecture on home warranties, but somehow delivered in platitudes, by Eeyore. During the show's middle segment, Posey was asked to evaluate his team's first-half performance and to share his impressions of what has gone right and what has gone wrong so far this season. The Giants are presently 41–55, fourth in their division and third from the bottom in the National League. They are a plodding, weary, strikingly juiceless team: The Giants are last in walks and stolen bases, but don't do nearly enough slugging to make up for it, and as a consequence have scored fewer runs than all but one NL team. Also, they have the league's third-worst fielding percentage. Hell, while we're here, Giants rookie skipper Tony Vitello has the National League's worst overturn percentage among managers. It's a bad baseball team.

The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is famously good at parenting. In the leaf litter of forests around the United Kingdom, the beetles scurry around in search of the small carcasses of mice and birds. Once the beetles find a suitable corpse, they get to work. First they strip the carcass of its fur or feathers and disembowel it. Then they smear it with brownish-red antimicrobial fluid. Finally, they roll the flesh into a ball and bury it in the sand. Once under the soil, the corpse is ready to become a nursery for the beetle's offspring—a putrefying rat refurbished into an artisanal crib. (Here is a photo of one such crib, if your curiosity is piqued.) A nursery needs babies, and so the beetles must also get to a different kind of work. By this I mean the beetles must mount each other. If you are having trouble imagining this, please enjoy the art below. Is it just me or does this burying beetle mating illustration look like Plato's Allegory of the Cave?

Here's how we got on this: Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub. He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts. Giri Nathan The only movie I've ever walked out of was Kazaam. If I remember correctly, I told my mom I had to go pee, and then after that we simply decided not to go back inside. I think even at that age I clocked it as irredeemable. The angriest I've ever been at a movie while sitting in a theater was Rise of Skywalker. I left with plumes of steam coming out of my ears.

Like every previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories. The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage success of the African teams, and most memorably by Cape Verde. You also had the tactical story of the tournament, in how the teams with the most fluid and attractive attacking play achieved it by eschewing the sport's dominant strategic meta—the spread-'em-wide-and-pin-'em-high positional gambit, which has grown boring to watch and increasingly easy for defenses to counteract—to instead bring players closer together, looking to create space through spontaneous movement, collaboration, and deception, producing unpredictable moves full of technical inventiveness that baffled opponents and dazzled spectators. The exemplars of this refreshing brand of free-flowing soccer were Morocco and Colombia (honorable mentions go to the group-stage versions of Argentina and the United States), and in particular the brief but extraordinary cameos of Colombian cult favorite, Juan Fernando Quintero. Then there was the anti-VAR story. It doesn't require belief in the more fanciful conspiracies about FIFA rigging the tournament in favor of Argentina to appreciate all the ways VAR has made the game worse. To wit, it has dulled the emotional impact of what should be moments of explosive sentiment, has made it so that the key replays after goals are no longer the best angles of amazing strikes but rather freeze-frames of back lines so that you can guess whether review will deem someone offside by an eyebrow, and overall has created conditions that only exacerbate the sense of inconsistency, suspicion, and unfairness that the replay system was meant to eliminate. Breel Embolo's red card against Argentina was the nadir, a call that by the letter of the new, confusing law may have been correct, but that violated any conceivable notion of justice. So yes, over the course of a long tournament, especially during the early, most entertaining stage, the World Cup offers a rich variety of stories, all of them worthwhile in their own right. But as the competition winds toward its conclusion, the World Cup always returns to its principal theme: that the only thing that truly matters in soccer is having the best of the best.

It is the policy of Defector that co-owners who are on vacation should, when on vacation, try their best to be on vacation. There are complicating factors to this simple-sounding rule—it is both easy and tempting to pop into Slack during lulls or just out of habit, and that is only made more so by the years of damage or just slippage related to the idea of what are and aren't working hours—but it is a good policy. I say this as someone who wrote a decently long story for the site during my recently concluded vacation, although I can at least partially credit some untenably disgusting weather along with the aforementioned bad habits for that one. But some time away from work is an important and good thing no matter who you are, and I was glad to have it. Which is why I feel compelled to explain why I took a few moments out of my vacation last week to send Drew some questions about the San Diego Padres for him to ask Justin Halpern. Should I have done this? By the policy described above, absolutely not. But Justin Halpern appearances are very valuable to me, and if I was going to miss one, I wanted to make sure that my questions about his aesthetically unpleasant, objectively mediocre, completely baffling baseball team of choice made it into the episode. As it happened, Justin had to push his appearance back a week, which means I got to ask those questions myself. And if it was not my best work to spend my precious and limited time in Maine thinking about how best to ask what is wrong with Manny Machado, it was gratifying—after Drew told a story about recognized at the beach due to his distinctive noises, and Justin told a story about retiring Jose Canseco via groundout in a men's league game, to Ozzie Canseco's dismay—to get to hear Justin's answer.

The Milwaukee Bucks are going to have a hilarious roster next season. Tyler Herro! Myles Turner! Kevin Porter Jr.! Caris LeVert! Kyle fuckin' Kuzma! To assemble this Jaywalkers' Row of contributors, while also affording all of the non-corporeal essence of Damian Lillard that can be purchased with $22 million, takes some serious finagling. So much finagling, apparently, that it draws the concerned attention of the league's front office: According to a report from ESPN's Shams Charania, the Bucks are currently being investigated by the NBA for bizarre spending behavior. At issue is the deal made between the Bucks and free-agent guard Gary Trent Jr., who over the weekend agreed to a new four-year contract worth $64 million. Just in math terms, there is nothing extreme about the deal. The veteran minimum for a player who, like Trent, has played eight seasons in the NBA, is about $6.7 million. The maximum, for which Trent is not eligible, is more than $57 million. The non-taxpayer mid-level exception for the upcoming season—a carve-out for teams over the salary cap but under the luxury tax threshold, like the Bucks—is right about $16 million. Trent's new contract escalates season by season, and for the upcoming season will pay him a little over $14 million, per Spotrac. In NBA terms, a $16 million annual salary is not an eye-popping commitment. But in Gary Trent Jr. terms, a $16 million annual salary is, uhh, quite a lot. Meaning no more than the usual disrespect, Trent is just a guy, a streaky if hyper-willing shooter who does precisely nothing else of consequence on an NBA floor. He has played two seasons with the Bucks, and over that span was broadly awful. Last season he averaged 8.1 points per game, mostly as a reserve, and the Bucks were hopelessly overmatched during his minutes, worse by net rating by more than nine points per 100 possessions. The Bucks were hoping that Trent could keep them spaced and firing around Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Antetokounmpo's injuries plus the team's rapidly souring vibes ruined each of Milwaukee's last two campaigns, and now Giannis is in Miami and the team is a shambles.

Yes, posting a bunch of high-quality photos of fans taken right after their team lost a big game is a bit like shooting cod in a barrel, but I think you'll agree that there is something about crestfallen England fans that makes them particularly striking. I mean, just look at the before and after of the poor lad at the top of this post. Is that not the agony of being a sports fan, perfectly distilled into two images? This is what getting your soul snatched by Lionel Messi, after 30 minutes of cowardly defending, does to a country.

Baseball is a game of centimeters, and every carefully placed hair on a pitcher's head is the difference between a Cy Young season and an ERA higher than your jersey number. Take Toronto's Dylan Cease. At the All-Star Game, Cease explained that during spring training, he began turning his head toward third base mid-delivery in order to avoid rotating too quickly on his pitches. This is a small alteration, yet he has lowered his ERA to 2.56 from last year's 4.55. After hearing Cease describe the weight of his head (13 pounds), I realized that I had neglected so much of the minutiae that goes into a baseball player's success. Dedicating the better part of my next hour to meticulous research, I have developed a handful of seemingly minuscule yet ultimately revolutionary changes that baseball players can make to drastically improve their performance. Here are my suggestions: Fastball pitchers may find it helpful to shave their beards and keep their hair trimmed in order to prevent a deleterious drag on their four-seamer. The resulting velocities will turn every pitcher into a mini-Miz and leave batters cowering in fear at the plate.  For those pitchers trying to perfect their off-speed stuff, daily thumb-twiddling exercises can strengthen their grip on the ball, thus increasing both vertical and horizontal break. Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven swore by this technique, and very few know that his infamous habit of flipping off fans was not intended as a rude gesture, but was instead one of his regular finger-strengthening routines.  If you think the Soto Shuffle is a mere celebratory shimmy of the hips, you are sorely mistaken. The movement increases hip flexibility for a quicker and more powerful swing, and I theorize that this was a key contributor to Juan Soto's back-to-back Silver Slugger wins. If one were to expand the shuffle into a full-on samba, he would likely find a substantial increase in bat speed, exit velocity, and barrels. Studies indicate that catchers who tie their cleats with the "bunny ears" method rather than the standard one-loop method could dramatically improve their pop time. The bunny ears method increases toe flexibility and ankle strength, allowing for catchers to jump up from behind home with more acceleration and precise positioning for the throw to second. Sources say that JT Realmuto will throw his teammates' cleats out the window if he sees anyone on the Phillies tying them in a way that does not remind him of a rabbit. Batters who thank Jesus every time they touch a base are twice as likely to bat in a run on their next at-bat as those who only thank Jesus when crossing home. This reasoning is self-explanatory.  Pitchers and catchers would do well to kiss each other on the cheek after every mound visit. Such brotherly affection would promote communication and chemistry between players, and with runners on the corners, it's very important that lingering thoughts like "Does everyone secretly hate me?" and "I hope I didn't say something weird when we all huddled up" not creep into the head of an anxiety-prone reliever.  A belly-button piercing may very well be a better slump buster than Jason Giambi's gold thong. This season, a certain player went from having one of the worst batting averages in the league to enjoying a breakout series against a New York team during which he picked up 15 RBI. The only difference between the before and after was a brand new bejeweled piercing on his belly button. I will refer to this player as "Dansby S." in order to protect his anonymity. The most refined ballplayers understand the importance of scheduling a consultation with Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo, before a game. Such meetings are correlated with better plate discipline. A dream I had last week alerted me to the little-known fact that Ted Williams was a frequent visitor of Tiresias and attributed his high bases-on-balls-to-plate-appearance ratio to the mythical clairvoyant. Research indicates that batters who use Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" as a walk-up song are three times more likely to make it to first on a bunt than those who demonstrate a lack of musical taste at the plate. Further study is needed to know if the live version from the 1974 album Miles of Aisles is more effective than the original version from the 1969 album Clouds, or the 2000 re-recording with orchestral backing.

CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE, France — Roughly 15 minutes after driving past the start line, Harry Talbot decides it's time to pull over next to a field of droopy sunflowers. He scouted the route of Stage 11 of the Tour de France kilometer by kilometer earlier this year on Google Street View to identify potential spots where he and his fellow photographers could set up their shots, and we'd arrived at the first of the day. To my eye, the sunflower field is perfect. To Talbot, Zac Williams, and Max Fries, it is pretty clearly lacking. Talbot explains that he doesn't like the background of scrubby oaks on the far side of the field. "The sunflowers are nicely spaced, but the road isn't high enough to layer the shot," Williams observes. "It's not shit, but it's not a banger." They won't do. We drive on. I spent Stage 11 embedded with the trio of photographers. Williams and Talbot host the Race Chasers podcast together, and they're shooting for a handful of clients: some bike sponsors, some teams, some apparel brands. Fries works for Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe; while the other two photographers are targeting several dozen riders, he's only shooting eight. That's a limitation, rather than an advantage. "You only have eight possibilities," Fries said. "Yesterday on the climb, they were hidden in the group."