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While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis. Men are in trouble. The "masculinity crisis" is real. The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers, like Andrew Tate, to those who focus more on maximizing their own physical bodies, like Bryan Johnson and Clavicular. The blatantly sexist, racist, and homophobic language of figures like Christian nationalist Pastor Doug Wilson, who says women shouldn’t vote, and influencers like Myron Gaines has garnered a fair amount of inquiry and alarm—most recently in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Inside the Manosphere. But not all men want to treat masculinity as a math problem that cheapens women. Former GQ editor Sean Hotchkiss has recently written a “memoir of male rage and recovery,” provocatively titled Hating Women. After years of engaging in hookup culture, he’s become a life coach focused on creating positive masculinity.  Hotchkiss joins the chorus of those claiming that heterosexuality is in crisis. Instead of arguing for nihilism, he proposes a kind of radical optimism. Men, he believes, can be reformed. He knows this because he was once the kind of guy who used women for relief. While Hotchkiss never quite seemed to try on the manosphere-inflected world of conspiracy theories and intense fitness, he did enjoy a certain amount of wealth and promiscuity. Yet, he discovers, “women held this incredible power over” him. Porn was his first line of defense in terms of stress relief.

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — After several years of lurking in the shadows, the specter of doping once again looms over the Tour de France. Though nobody has tested positive—or no positive test results have been made public—the biggest story at this year's Tour is a renewed aggression from testing authorities and a resultant increasing hostility from the riders. The tactics executed by anti-doping officials and the legal justifications marshaled to support them represent a modernization of anti-doping rules, intended to disrupt hypothetical cutting-edge pharmacological routines designed specifically to beat previous testing methods. The International Testing Agency (ITA) and the Union Cyclistes International (UCI) are no longer passively accepting that the extant testing regime is good enough. Here we see the latest iteration of an eternal story in cycling. The uneasy symbiosis between professional cyclists and the UCI is built on a shared interest in winning the public's trust. However, the sport's history makes that a fraught proposition, and while the riders would argue that a dearth of positive tests shows that nobody's cheating, the authorities would counter that no doping cases only means nobody's getting caught. Though riders and authorities ultimately want the same thing, it's incredibly difficult to balance labor's desire to be treated as trustworthy against management's desire to appear strong, without the former looking like liars or the latter looking like fools. So what's changed this year, and what does it say about the future of that delicate balance?

Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason." The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that person will soon be excitedly detailing hours-long conversations they had with their computer. So how far gone is Sirianni?

Just as every film is really about filmmaking, isn't every film also an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey? The hero's journey. The antihero's journey. The road trip movie. The war movie. Movies set in space or at sea, in the middle of a treacherous jungle or a barren desert. The story of Odysseus is a foundational myth, which makes the proposition of an actual movie of The Odyssey seem, among other things, redundant. And that's before you get to the near impossibility of filming it. But tell Christopher Nolan it's impossible to do something, and he will only want to do it more. And so we have his vision of The Odyssey, a massive, operatic cinematic experience mostly about the story's own operatic massiveness. In many ways, Nolan especially has always been making The Odyssey from the inside out, obsessed as he has been with his own harrowing quest to make big, majestic spectacles. It makes sense for him to just finally go at it for real. Nolan heightens and demystifies the mythology in equal measure, and the result is a throwback to the epic cinematic expressions of David Lean and Fritz Lang. It's also a treatise on Nolan's favorite subject: history's great men and the messes they make. The Odyssey is, of course, the story of wily Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his 20-year journey back home following the Trojan war. He and his men battle the currents, run into giants, cannibals, witches, sirens, and his own dead soldiers in his bid to get back to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who are barely holding his kingdom together as the many suitors vying for Penelope impose their will in Odysseus's absence. Damon's Odysseus is a wizened general, weary after another battle fought on behalf of King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). He's a serious, brilliant man, but arrogant in the face of mercurial Gods, which leads to much of his suffering.

A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story.  If given the opportunity, FIFA would have very happily stripped every seat and beam and light fixture out of the venue that hosted Sunday’s World Cup Final and pawned it all off. In keeping with the organization’s best practices, those prices could have been set dynamically, while also being manipulated into an artificial scarcity that didn’t remotely reflect actual market demand. But only the grass sod that had been rolled out over the regular MetLife Stadium turf wasn’t bolted down, and so that would have to do.  That surface was far too dry and slow for high-level soccer, according to the players who contested some of the biggest games of their lives on subpar grass. Even from way up in the press box, you could see the ball bobbling about unprovoked and dying on its way from one player to the next. 

On Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Atlanta Hawks, and Dallas Mavericks completed a three-team trade that was depressing for at least two big reasons. The first reason: Just two years after being selected first overall in the NBA Draft, Zaccharie Risacher has been kicked to the curb. The 21-year-old Frenchman had already fallen out of Atlanta's wing rotation during the regular season, and saw scant garbage-time minutes in the team's first-round playoff exit. To acquire a former No. 1 pick entering his third season, the Mavs only had to give up a second-round pick and undersized backup point guard Ryan Nembhard, who will go to Atlanta. The 2024 draft was thought to be a weak crop, but plenty of players taken in the first round, and possibly a handful taken in the second, appear to be headed for more fruitful NBA careers than Risacher. On an optimistic read, he's still got enough size and shooting to stick around someone's rotation after his current contract, but the fact that this is even a subject of speculation for a player of this pedigree is grim. The second reason this trade is a bummer: Just one year after winning the NBA championship, the Thunder are already cutting costs and losing depth. Lu Dort, a beefy, goofy, dirty wing whose contributions were crucial to OKC's title run—even if his offensive shortcomings hurt them in their 2026 playoff push—was shipped to Atlanta, where he'll play out the last year of his current contract. In return, the Thunder merely picked up three second-round picks.

Well, well, well, would you look at that. We have a fancy new website. This redesign is the result of a lot of hard work by our esteemed partners at Lede, and they have provided us with a homepage that is much more customizable. We now have the ability to highlight specific stories, coverage areas,…

And let the conspiracy theories begin. George Russell had spent the past three race weekends painstakingly narrowing the gap to his wunderkind Mercedes teammate in the Drivers' Championship standings. Luck, for once, fell in his favor. And then on Sunday at the Belgian Grand Prix, Russell yet again had a hellish day. With luck a tired nemesis, it fell upon spectators to find another cosmic horror to blame. Such as: Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. Here are some factual observations. Russell, who started third on the grid, had a relatively poor start off the line, and was swarmed by both Ferrari drivers from behind. While Russell managed to cling to his position through the first corner, his engine struggled to deploy energy on the Kemmel Straight, leaving him a sitting duck. First, Charles Leclerc zipped by. Then, Lewis Hamilton stayed on the inside of Russell through the next corner, washed slightly wide, and spun Russell out of the race. Russell was far angrier about the lack of straight-line power than the collision. "I had no fucking battery down the straight!" he yelled on the radio after literally crashing out. Over the course of the past three race weekends, Russell had managed to close the gap by 25 points. After less than one lap of racing, all of that progress had been undone. That collision with Hamilton helps demonstrate why it is easy to theorize in F1. Though Hamilton was on cold tires during the first lap of the race and left plenty of room for Russell—and both Russell and commentator Jolyon Palmer dubbed the collision a racing incident—Hamilton was saddled with a harsh five-second penalty. Meanwhile on lap eight, Hamilton's teammate Leclerc took the liberty of trying to squeeze the McLaren of Oscar Piastri off the race track and just bumped into the side of him, and somehow went entirely unpenalized.

One Defector intern explains baseball to another. Sohini: When I used to call it boring, my dad used to tell me that baseball is a game of immense strategy. I didn’t doubt him, exactly, but it did carry the vibe of “Dad saying stuff to fit in with other dads.” I never took the time to familiarize myself with that strategy, and have instead treated the handful of baseball games I’ve been to as loud, fun, kitschy bars. So when it came time to fact-check a baseball blog in the process of obtaining this internship, I had to first familiarize myself with obscure concepts like “dingers,” “extra-base hits,” and “Mookie Betts.” Sarah, this is My Fair Slugger. I am Eliza Doolittle, and you are Henry Higgins. By the end of this blog, I hope you will transform me from someone who doesn’t know the top of a bat from its bottom into a tobacco-chewing baseball savant. 

Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police. He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which he has since honored—despite her reputation as a law-and-order booster for “quality of life” policing, an opponent of bail reform, and a fierce defender of the city’s Strategic Response Group, a police unit known for its violent repression of protests since its creation in 2015, among other disreputable credentials. While Mamdani’s campaign featured a proposal to create a new Department of Community Safety, which would expand the city’s use of non-police “violence interrupters” and mental health professionals for nonviolent calls for intervention, he tactically avoided making police reform, and especially police accountability, a central flank of his campaign.  Mamdani’s reticence is not merely reflective of electoral calculation. It’s also the product of what historian Stuart Schrader, in his commanding new book Blue Power, defines as the phrase he uses for his title: the massive, impenetrable edifice of political might that cops wield through their unions and professional organizations. Through adopting and perverting methods of agitation honed by labor unions, such as collective bargaining, work slowdowns, strikes, and campaign organizing, police muscled their way to gain control over local and federal governments, “exerting,” as Schrader writes, “a veto power over democracy.” It’s now relatively understood that the institution of policing, with roots in both Southern slave patrols and in Northern efforts to discipline Black and immigrant labor, is a purveyor of racialized state violence. But cops do not passively enforce orders, serving as dangerous but agentless foot soldiers for the monied elite. Rather, Schrader shows how rank-and-file cops pursued an “explicit, specific, [and] self-interested” political project that decisively augmented the police’s power and institutionalized their outsized influence over municipal politics. Blue power explains how police became so distinctly insulated from democratic controls, and why their distended budgets remain relatively untouchable. It demystifies how police repeatedly repel efforts to check and dismantle their power, even when public consciousness about policing’s functionally racist, extortionary, and excessively violent operation reaches a fever pitch. As Schrader writes, “atop steady-state racism and economic exploitation that shape every aspect of our political system, police have become experts in bending that system further to their will.”