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There's probably no reason for the World Cup third-place match to exist. Unlike the Olympics, when a coveted bronze medal is at stake, third place at the World Cup doesn't offer much to teams. By and large, these matches tend to involve mentally checked-out players mainly concerned with avoiding an injury so that they can fully relax once they get to the beaches and/or yachts they will spend the next several weeks sitting on, where they will nurse the pain from the semifinal loss and rest up ahead of another long club season. Because of that lack of stakes and interest, the quality of play in these games, especially on the defensive side, is usually at an all-star game level. Those less-than-intense conditions are exactly what made England-France on Saturday so wonderfully stupid to watch. At the end of a hot and humid afternoon in Miami, England clinched its first-ever third-place finish at a World Cup with a scoreline of 6-4, after a match that was an orgy of offense. Defense was indeed optional and broadly eschewed by both teams, first by France for the entirety of the first half and then by England in an 18-minute French burst to start the second half. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDZco2h-zcw

MULHOUSE, France — Stage 12 of the 2026 Tour de France was supposed to be boring. Maybe it would have been were it not for Quinn Simmons, who did what he does best and made the peloton quake with a thumping attack. The American champion seized the initiative with 35 kilometers left, splintering the bunch and dragging a dozen strong riders with him, turning what would have otherwise been a dull procession into a thrilling finale. Very few riders are strong enough to cleave a charging peloton like that on a flat day; fewer still have the casual power to be able to initiate and execute a full-speed high five with their flag-waving father while doing so; and only Simmons could inspire equally strong reactions of annoyance and excitement with such a cool, daring move. https://twitter.com/RNBWCV/status/2077772632246685756 There really isn't anyone like Simmons in the professional peloton. As is evident in the clip, Simmons has one of the biggest engines in the world. While he's won stages at a handful of big races and gotten into some strong top 10s, his racecraft hasn't always matched his strength, so he's still searching for a career-defining win. But what truly makes him stand out is his willingness to use that engine to cut straight into the wind. This makes Simmons both an incredible domestique when he's riding for a teammate and a supreme animator of bike races when he's riding for himself. He helped Jonathan Milan win last year's points jersey and is currently helping Mads Pedersen do the same this year, setting up a dominant breakaway win for Pedersen on Stage 4 and still finding the time to drive several moves. Cycling involves so much strategic passivity. Simmons races in refusal of that notion.

On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more of the agents fired at least six shots, at least four of which went through the windshield. As recorded on eyewitness video, the agents then pulled Durán Guerrero's limp body from the car and shackled his wrists. He did not survive. This killing—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigrant death squads have committed in the U.S. since the start of Donald Trump's crackdown—has been met with public outrage, but nothing indicates that the federal government thinks anything went wrong at all. As is its custom, ICE told lies about its victim, calling Durán Guerrero an "illegal alien" in its statement and suggesting that agents slaughtered the unarmed man in front of his toddler daughter due to the threat he posed to public safety. Friday morning, the Associated Press published a lengthy story about the individual ICE agent believed to have fired the fatal shots. David Brouillette is 37 years old and, according to members of his own family who spoke to the AP, has been a known danger to the people around him for virtually his entire life. A long trail of family-court records portrays him as a violent, unhinged abuser of his former spouses and children, a stalker and harasser, a serial loser of jobs. A telling detail in the AP's story is that when in 2025 Brouillette told an ex-wife that he'd gotten a job with ICE, she assumed that he was, in the AP's wording, "having a mental health episode," and continued believing that was the case until she found out this week that he'd killed a man. Whether because of the kind of guy she knew him to be or because of assumptions she held about the U.S. government or both, the idea that she was hearing psychotic raving struck her as more plausible than that a federal agency had agreed to give her former abuser a badge and a gun.

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.