NowLoop

There was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for. As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were about when you were a man in an unhappy marriage. Sometimes you were English and sometimes you were a college professor and sometimes you worked in The Business Industry, but that was about the size of things as far as I could tell. Some of these books, which I read and at some level enjoyed and admired very much, doubtless hold up; I am also surely being a little rude or just unfair to your Saul Bellow types, who were writing more about how it feels or what it means to be a man in an unhappy marriage. But even when that was what I understood this work to be, and what I wanted to do with my life, there was something that felt confining about it. This was not just because I had not yet had many or any of the experiences that these books lavished over and raged against, although I'm sure that didn't help. But the idea that this was all there was—all that unhappy grown-up stuff, over and over, unfolding in spaces I mostly recognized from other such stories—didn't feel right to me. To be clear, that in no way meant that I'd given up on the idea of pacing anxiously through those very same halls for the rest of my life; I didn't give up on being a great American novelist until I'd been out of school for nearly a decade, although what first felt like a personal identity crisis quickly declined into something much more like relief. But I think it explains, in retrospect, why the books I read that kicked holes in those familiar walls or just declined to make the gestures I'd come to expect felt so thrilling and vital to me. I had been so busy and so serious in examining the fixtures and finishes and clever design elements in those rooms that I hadn't realized how claustrophobic it felt in there, and how thin that recycled air had become.

The WNBA season begins tonight. Rather than preview each team, I've decided to look at some storylines I’ll be following through some of the league's best characters. This has nothing to do with the fact that I only came back from book leave on Thursday and didn't have a lot of time to write a preview. In fact, working on a book has merely pushed me to consider alternative narrative dimensions and explore new modes of storytelling, such as this. Napheesa Collier Looms Large

To watch the Detroit Pistons is to marvel at the highest level of team defense being played anywhere in the NBA. The mental strain they induce in opponents is remarkable, as offenses will cycle through primary, secondary, and tertiary options with increasing mania, unable to engineer anything open despite putting the Pistons deep in rotation. They fly around the perimeter, making dozens of cascading collective decisions despite scant time or space to communicate with each other. It's a sight to behold, one whose only statistical echo is what they've done to poor, overmatched James Harden's two-game box score: nine made field goals, 11 turnovers, and 1-for-11 three-point shooting. The theory of this most recent Harden trade was that Cleveland wanted a regular-style point guard to relieve Donovan Mitchell of his playmaking burden, further unlock their imposing yet stodgy pair of bigs, and do so without totally compromising their defense. It's not often that Harden, one of the league's premier stander-arounders, is thought of as anything better than a total traffic cone on that end of the court, but Darius Garland is tiny and way more easily picked on. Harden wants to play slow and control the offense from the top of the key, and the idea is that he can apply constant pressure with his pull-up and foul-baiting abilities. Those who watched Harden fall apart at the end of the playoffs in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2017, 2015, or 2013 will not be surprised to learn that it's not going too well. The Pistons have Harden in hell. His defense has been as mediocre as expected, but the really concerning aspect of his play has been his invisibility on offense. Other than the fourth quarter of Game 1, Harden has not been able to get to the basket. Detroit surprised many when they began that game with Cade Cunningham on Harden. With Ausar Thompson spending most of his time on Mitchell duty, the only way for the Pistons to simultaneously insulate Duncan Robinson and keep their guards out of size mismatches was to begin with their superstar on Harden. He's done a great job, though defending in the playoffs is a team endeavor, and Detroit has pressured Harden ridiculously well. Some of his turnovers have come while trying to kick out into collapsing passing lanes, but mostly he has crapped himself while being defended one-on-one.

Days before the second Clásico of the La Liga season, the Real Madrid locker room is reportedly falling apart. Courtesy of a running faucet of leaks that has been spraying since early on Thursday, it is clear that the club is suffering from some kind of internal civil war. The matter truly came to a head, so to speak, in the form of a physical confrontation between midfielders Aurélien Tchouaméni and Federico Valverde, the result of which sent Valverde to the hospital to be treated for a head injury. Beyond the pretty well-established broad outline of the situation, though, specifics and clarity have been hard to come by. And so anyone searching for more details from the assortment of reports coming out all over the Spanish media must venture in the land of soccer news aggregators, where EMPHASIS is KING and PEOPLE are FORGETTING THINGS all the time. https://twitter.com/themadridzone/status/2052442550380658831?s=46 Now, just because these kinds of aggregators are not themselves the most trustworthy sources of information, that doesn't mean there's no fire underneath all the smoke. As evidenced by the various sources cited by both Madrid Zone and Madrid Xtra, the two primary English-language aggregators of Real Madrid news, these reports do come from somewhere. Aggregators don't exactly make things up, but rather they are usually happy to post any and all truths, half-truths, and baseless speculation, so long as it emerges first from someone in the notoriously inconsistent and unreliable soccer media industrial complex. This makes for a hallucinogenic experience when something like "Two Real Madrid players might have had a fistfight that left one with TEMPORARY AMNESIA" comes into play. It was evident from the start that something had happened between Tchouaméni and Valverde, a fact that was confirmed by an official statement from the club late on Thursday, but it was also evident that most of the reporting that would come out about it would be contradictory, speculative, and incomplete.

The following is excerpted from A Fraction of a Point: A Gymnastics Dynasty on the Line, by Nina Mandell. Published by Kent State University Press. Reproduced with permission. The book is available for purchase now.  With the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School gymnastics team’s state win streak at five years old, Andrea Kinzer stood over her teammate Diana Moock, watching her as she sat on the ground calculating the scores from other teams across the meet. Diana, a numbers whiz with the nickname "the human calculator," was furiously computing the scores of the competition that the team had gathered through their intel sources. Brecksville had an advantage: The order of events was randomly decided and in their draw that year, they went after Magnificat. But there was bad news: After completing her quick math, Diana looked at the team. "We need to upgrade our skills," she said.

World Cup tickets are absurdly expensive and everyone is mad about it. Non-American fans seem to have been priced out of the tournament, judging by the lack of hotel reservations being made in host cities, and even FIFA Peace Prize recipient Donald Trump thinks things have gotten out of hand. "I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you," Trump told the New York Post when alerted to the fact that tickets to the USMNT's opening game are selling for upwards of $1,000. FIFA is to blame for this, as the organization can set face-value ticket prices however it pleases. The top ticket price for this year's final is more than $10,000, whereas a similar ticket for the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar cost $1,600. According to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, these extortionist prices aren't actually the result of FIFA's own choices, but of the nefarious American custom of ticket reselling. Infantino spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, and had this to say for himself:

Gaza is the compass. These words—emblazoned on large banners at the 2025 People's Conference For Palestine in Detroit, and frequently invoked by comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement at speeches and rallies—contain a truth with which so much of the world has yet to reckon, though it will sweep them along regardless.  In other words, Gaza is the place—and the event—in reference to which we must orient our actions, our thoughts, our lives. It is the most important place in the world right now, because the genocide taking place in all of historic Palestine, with Gaza as its most brutal flashpoint, reveals the foundation of violence and domination on which the architecture of the present world order has been built, as well as the terrible struggle that will be necessary to tear it down.  It is understandable, then, that so many writers have turned their attention to Gaza since 2023. Indeed, this attention is exactly what is required of us. A failure to think about Gaza means a failure to think at all: Any thought which bears no trace of the absolute inhumanity of the present has already taken the side of the murderers. Thinking about Gaza implies a responsibility as well: to treat the subject with the requisite seriousness and attention so that one does not add to the significant trove of poor, cynical writing on the Palestinian people and their struggle; to understand one’s limitations while simultaneously attempting to reach outside them; to assimilate horror, yes, but to think beyond it towards liberation as well.

We need to be adults about this: Hockey is real. The NHL's playoffs are in point of fact going on right now. There is just no sense in hiding from it. While I wouldn't say we were hiding from the reality of our current Hockey Situation in recent weeks, it is true Drew and I have talked much more about baseball, basketball, and even football than we have about our fourth and coldest major sport. It was with remedying that in mind, and also because she is a delightful person to talk to, that we had Defector Hockey Headmistress Lauren Theisen on the podcast to talk hockey this week. After the usual prefatory buffoonery and accent work, we discussed Lauren's recent adventure in New York City real estate and remembered some shitty apartments. This bit was brief, but it is fair to say that it has it all: an uninsulated and worryingly cold bathroom, a secret room high above Lauren's kitchen, sneaky touristic visits to fancy furniture stores, the works. But, cards on the table, it does not contain any hockey.

As most home teams do in Game 2 after dropping a series opener, the San Antonio Spurs evened their series with a vengeance Wednesday night, rolling the Minnesota Timberwolves, 133-95. None of the visitors scored more than 12 points, each of the 14 Minnesota players who saw the floor posted a negative plus-minus, and Anthony Edwards evaluated his team's performance with quotes such as, "My momma used to tell me that a hard head make a soft ass. That's what happened tonight." The Spurs' stars finally showed up, though the author of the game's biggest moments was a rookie. Seven electric games into his NBA playoff career, it's time to talk about Dylan Harper. The box score will say Harper had a decent Game 2, with 11 points on 10 shots, seven boards, five assists, and two steals. The experience of watching him put together that stat line will have the observer thinking heretical thoughts about dynasties, superfluous All-NBA teammates, and the commissioner's office taking regulatory action against the Spurs for getting another ball-handler this capable. Harper is simply good at everything. He knows where to be, itself a somewhat complicated challenge given that he typically plays with at least one other point guard. Harper is less experienced than Stephon Castle and De'Aaron Fox, but he's a better shooter than either, leaving him to attack shifting defenses and move around behind the play while his teammates explode through people and shift around them, respectively. Harper's skillset is not yet as polished as those guys', but it is more well-rounded. You can see it in his confidence around the three-point arc, where he's been popping it with less hesitation with each passing month. You can see it as a help defender, where he finds ways to continually disrupt traffic in passing lanes without overexposing the Spurs' weak side (in fairness, overexposing the Spurs' weak side is basically impossible, given that Victor Wembanyama patrols it). Mostly, you can see it in transition: Give Harper a head of steam, and he'll finish on anyone. His skill as a finisher around the rack jumped off the screen in his NBA debut against the Dallas Mavericks back in October, and he's only improved as an open-court decision maker as the season's progressed.

The legacy of the World Cup is intertwined with human rights abuses and propagandizing on behalf of killers and despots. The 2026 tournament has already sullied itself with things like the handing of a totally real FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump, and FIFA president Gianni Infantino's botched attempt to engineer a Palestine-Israel handshake photo op. Even Fox, the tournament's broadcast partner in the United States, has taken it upon itself to further make watching this World Cup an act of moral compromise. In a particularly dastardly move, the network has decided to inflict Jameis Winston on its viewers. https://twitter.com/FOXSports/status/2052154391873151278 Winston is apparently the "Fox Sports FIFA World Cup correspondent" for the tournament this summer. What does that mean? I have no idea, but it does involve giving Winston a microphone and a platform to use that microphone, so it can't be good. Winston's bullshit-as-motivational-speeches gimmick gets a lot of play, and attempts to paper over other horrible shit, but I can't imagine it translating well to a sport that he surely doesn't watch regularly. Then again, Alexi Lalas, who shows up in the announcement video, is employed by Fox already, so it's not like knowledge is a prerequisite.