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All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over—when they break your heart—we want the details. We want to know that Taylor Swift left her scarf there at his sister’s house and that Alanis Morissette went down on him in a theater. We want to know every gory little piece of what happened to you. Show us the knife wound. Show us the knife.  Part of creating anything is understanding which parts of you are interesting to others, and Lily Allen knows that in a breakup what people want (be they friends or fans) is details. On Friday, with just a few days' warning, Allen dropped a 14-song, 44-minute album called West End Girl. It’s an ideal breakup album because it’s petty and unconcerned with fairness. It throws all the dirty laundry right out onto the street. 

On Oct. 19, American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky was found dead in his Charlotte, NC home. He was a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and his death, which police say is being investigated as a possible overdose or suicide, has rocked the chess world. The U.S. Chess Championships held a moment of silence in his memory, tributes poured in from every corner of the chess community, and International Chess Federation (FIDE) president Arkady Dvorkovich announced that his organization would establish a special prize in Naroditsky's honor. Making sense of such a tragedy is necessarily a delicate process, but in this case, it's particularly difficult because of the nasty, internecine campaign that former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, who Naroditsky idolized, had been waging against the young grandmaster. Naroditsky was a particularly beloved member of the chess community. His parents emigrated from the Soviet Union and raised him in the Bay Area, where he first made a name for himself before bursting onto the international scene when he won the U-12 World Championships. The championship win earned him the title of Master, and he ascended smoothly to International Master and Grandmaster by the time he was 18. Naroditsky regularly partook in U.S. Chess Championships, once beating top American player Fabiano Caruana, but his specialty was the fastest forms of chess on offer, and he was a distinguished player in blitz, bullet, and hyperbullet formats.

Wednesday night in Los Angeles it was finally the Blue Jays' turn to benefit from a historic performance. They'd lost Game 2 of this World Series to an unhittable Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who put together nine innings of dominance the likes of which, by at least one measure, had not been seen in a World Series since before the launch of Sputnik. They'd lost a surreal Game 3 in which Shohei Ohtani socked two dingers and two doubles and reached base nine times in nine plate appearances, which has never happened before and is not likely to ever happen again, unless Ohtani someday does it himself. In their own wins, the Blue Jays had been normal—admirably normal—out there doing normal baseball things, simply put together in the right sequences. That Toronto's victories did not require anyone sprouting wings was encouraging, and helped to establish a sense that they'd been broadly the better team, even if the wins themselves were somewhat rudely overshadowed. The performance in Game 5 of rookie Blue Jays starting pitcher Trey Yesavage was not quite an Ohtani-level what the fuck is happening right now type of thing. Yesavage's 12 strikeouts were the most by a rookie in a World Series game in history. Yesavage, making his second start in this series, his fifth start of the postseason, and pitching on the road in a playoff game for the first time in his career, mowed his way through the Dodgers' lineup, making several of the game's biggest stars look overwhelmed and ridiculous along the way. His disgusting splitter, thrown from approximately the tropopause, induced seven swing-and-misses against just one ball-in-play; his slider, thrown from the same preposterous arm angle, induced a whopping 14 swing-and-misses. Just three of Yesavage's 104 pitches were hit hard and in play, per Statcast. One of them, launched by Kiké Hernandez into the stands in left in the bottom of the third inning, accounted for Yesavage's only run allowed in seven innings. Yesavage didn't even watch the ball fly out of there; two batters later, he used one of those dive-bombing splitters to make the best baseball player in the world look entirely foolish, and finished the inning. The Dodgers never came close to bothering him again.

Spiders are famous aesthetes. Many craft radially symmetric webs, first extruding long silken spokes and then spinning spiraling strands to snag prey. In the mornings, the intricately laid silk sparkles with dew drops. Your average, generic spiderweb spun by the most run-of-the-mill, Joe-Eightpack spider will still probably be one of the more beautiful structures constructed by invertebrates in your neighborhood—no offense to termites, which take a more brutalist approach to their design. But some spiders take web design a step further. After spinning spokes and spirals, certain arachnids might add a cross made of zig-zagging lines, or a latticed nebula that radiates out from the center of the web. These embellishments, called stabilimenta, are spun with the toughest type of spider silk, known as aciniform silk, the kind they use to cocoon and immobilize prey. And though their beauty is clear, their purpose is hazy.

Before he was stumbling over interview questions on national TV, before he was the guy who made North Carolina football worse, before you could bet on when he might be fired, Bill Belichick was one of the most respected men in football. It may feel like a lifetime ago, but six Super Bowl titles as head coach and 302 career wins in the NFL built that reputation. The expected trail of fawning headlines—Americans ranking him alongside the closest thing the modern NFL has to a founding father, Vince Lombardi; the Washington Post saying Belichick's New England Patriots should be considered one of the best dynasties in the history of world sports; the New York Times calling him a genius—all made a certain sense. Accusations that his team spied on opponents, another cheating scandal, and his own boss thinking he was an asshole never truly tarnished his public persona. The world changed a lot while Belichick reigned from his Foxborough throne for nearly a quarter of a century. When Belichick first joined the Patriots, Mark Zuckerberg was still a high schooler. The rise of social media, smartphones, the app store, podcasts, viral videos, streaming, and influencers—all that happened while Belichick was plugging away at football, until the Patriots cut him loose after a 4-13 record in the 2023 season.

A superstar slugger cannot be relied on like the take-over-a-game greats in other sports. You can't get him the ball again and again. You can't give him more minutes at the expense of the end of the bench. He needs other guys before and after him in the order to make his contributions mean something. Even if he's the best hitter who ever lived, more often than not he fails at the plate. This egalitarian setup, inherent to baseball, is how Guys like Bucky Dent, David Freese, or Howie Kendrick become legends. But in Game 4 on Tuesday night, it was the richest and most famous Blue Jay who controlled the game. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been pegged for greatness since he was born during spring training of 1999, after a season in which his father hit .324 and bopped 38 homers at a mere 23 years old. A top prospect as a teenager, Guerrero the younger debuted for Toronto at age 20 and was immediately a solid big-league hitter. The next couple seasons were made weird by COVID, but he dominated in 2021 with an OPS+ of 167 that was higher than Vlad Sr. ever achieved. However, a talent like his could only carry a team so far, and the Blue Jays continued to disappoint. They missed the playoffs in 2021, lost all four of their postseason games in '22 and '23 as Vlad took a step back offensively, then wasted a resurgence as he put up a .940 OPS for a squad that finished last in the AL East. Still, the Jays believed that they needed him if they were going to do something worthwhile this decade. In April, before he could become a free agent, Toronto signed the 26-year-old to a 14-year, $500 million contract. If nothing else, Blue Jays fans could feel safe investing in Vlad shirseys.

Every day brings with it the same threat: the possibility of learning something new about Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. The author of an historically malevolent piece of journalism has not been shy about using social media to let us all know how none of her friends like her anymore, on account of all the genocide denial she considers to be her day job. Now she's using it for a different purpose, and that is revealing to the world that she does not understand how to tell, or possibly even recognize, a joke.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

The best part of the first week of the NBA season is seeing preconceptions, built up over a summer spent consuming season previews, shattered by the hard reality of basketball games. Heading into this season, one such widely shared preconception was that the Rookie of the Year field was scarcely worth discussing, what with Cooper Flagg looking like a purpose-built destroyer for the modern game. He was going to start and play a significant role for a team with real aspirations, the thinking went, so why even take anyone else's chances seriously? This was occasionally followed by the odd mention that Ace Bailey was going to score a million points for a team that stunk, which voters might enjoy. Through one week of basketball, Flagg has been perhaps the fourth-most impressive rookie in the league, which has less to do with him than it does the state of the class of 2025. The rookies are going nuts.

There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though dismissing the euphoric potential of postseason baseball is straightforwardly outrageous, there are certain truths to this school of thinking. A three- or five- or even seven-game series is a hilarious way to determine the success of an MLB team; lazy regular-season baseball games are an ideal exercise in hedonism; and it's a good reminder that playoff games—for all the stakes and pressure and potential—can still, by virtue of being baseball and thus fundamentally at the whims of luck, wind up being, well. Just fine, I guess. For every historic Game 3 in the World Series, there is a Game 4, where everything unfolds about as you might expect. Shohei Ohtani the batter does not reach base nine times; Shohei Ohtani the pitcher does not throw six shutout innings and also hit three homers. The game lasts nine innings with a respectable, series-leveling 6-2 scoreline, instead of 18 innings with a walk-off home run. The nerve!