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The Boston Legacy is not known for being gentle. The expansion team has earned more yellow cards and committed more fouls than any other club in the NWSL this year. On Sunday, that didn’t matter for Leicy Santos. At least twice, the Washington Spirit midfielder found herself with the ball cornered by three Boston players. With remarkable efficiency, she made them all look like fools. After a few deft touches and even better body positioning, she had evaded considerable pressure and released the ball to an open teammate. In fact, I’m not even confident that this didn’t happen more than twice; such is the grace with which Santos can slip out of impossible situations. You only see it if you’re looking for it.  Of course, there was no missing Santos’s contribution on the first goal of the match, a looping one-touch cross to Tara Rudd, who headed the ball back across the goal mouth above the hands of Casey Murphy. Washington went on to win the game 2-1. The performance wasn’t their most flashy, but it was impressive considering it came just four days after they played Gotham FC in abhorrently smoky conditions in New York City. Most starters from that Gotham game were rested against Boston. Santos was not one of them; she was one of only three outfield players to start both games, and played 170 minutes across the two contests.  Halfway into the season, the Spirit sit at the top of the table, and Santos is a big reason why. Her importance to the team is partly borne out of necessity; when the Spirit traded away Croix Bethune, the league’s most exciting attacking midfielder, before the season started, they didn’t bring anyone in to replace her. Fans of the perennial contenders were puzzled. Losing Bethune, as Yuki Nagasato tweeted, was losing the attack’s brain.

There’s a type of public relations exercise that unfolds like a joke. In it, a notable figure who has chosen to sit for a longform profile, declined to answer a sensitive question through her representative, posed for a corresponding photoshoot, and recently "hopscotched across the country" to engage in "a slew" of "business opportunities and brand activations" insists she doesn't care what other people think of her. Sophie Cunningham sure doesn't. As Hallie Grossman, the author of an ESPN profile published Tuesday, writes: You might delight in her, or you might decry her; either way, she draws you in. So whether you call Cunningham an enforcer or a dirty player, a role model or a culture warrior, fearless or shameless, brave or brazen -- you will keep calling her. And she won't mind. Which, perhaps, as much as anything, is the key to her ascension. "People love me or they really frickin' hate me," she says. "I just don't care."

The Minnesota Lynx are comfy. They woke up Wednesday morning at the top of the WNBA standings with a 21-6 record, the league's best net rating, and a bespectacled point guard who has become the coolest player in the league halfway through her first season. These are the sort of circumstances that allow for an organization to be extremely chill in coming up with a plan for reintegrating a four-time All-WNBA superstar back into the starting lineup. It doesn't get much more chill than a Wednesday afternoon road game against the Seattle Storm, one day before the start of the all-star break. Those are the circumstances under which Napheesa Collier returned to the court for the Lynx. The Lynx won the game, 86-76, and afterwards all the talk was about how Collier, returning to action following offseason surgeries on both of her ankles, is going to be taking it slow. "This is an evolution," head coach Cheryl Reeve said after the game, about Collier's reintegration. "We're not at the end of this ... there will still be ups and downs. There's no doubt about it." That echoed Reeve's pregame caution, when she stressed to reporters that Collier has "a couple more steps to go" and would be playing on a minutes restriction.

The actor Eli Gelb has really found a niche for himself as "unassuming guy in a three-hour play who's able to avoid getting directly hit by the drama." Before catching him in Birthright, the new off-Broadway play from Jonathan Spector, I'd last seen Gelb as the sound engineer Grover in the Tony-winning Stereophonic. In that play, which was clearly inspired by the making of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, he begins the job ambitious and a little naive before the bad behavior of rock stars forces him to grow some protective layers. In Birthright, Gelb's character Noah has a similar professional drive, and he, too, has a core earnestness that you don't want to see overridden by a more convenient posture of cynicism. A viewer might appreciate the satisfaction of an ending like the one in Stereophonic, which sees him rediscovering what gave his work meaning in the first place. But Birthright doesn’t pretend to offer any easy closure. It would be a real writerly heat check to compare the making of Rumours to Judaism: There's all this arguing, and these wild stories, and it all leads to a beautiful, lasting thing that brings a lot of disparate folks together, and also serves as a kind of mythical ideal of what a group of inherently flawed people could be at their best. Luckily, I would never do that. But Birthright does feel like a play on an epic journey to justify the importance of the religion at a time when some of its adherents use it to justify the killing of children. For some audience members, the play will succeed in that mission, and for others I think it will fall short. Neither of those groups, in my eyes, would be wrong. Birthright covers the evolution of a friend group who came together in their early 20s on a trip to Israel. Broken neatly into three briskly paced hour-long acts, the first part takes place a few weeks after their return to the U.S., in the middle of George W. Bush's second term. The middle section is the night before a wedding in October 2016, unknowingly on the eve of the Trump years, and then the last part takes place in the near-present, well after the events of Oct. 7, 2023. In the beginning, the characters share some misgivings about the political weirdness of the Birthright program and the way it might try to show college kids that living in Israel is just a big cool party, but those are mostly eclipsed by more pressing questions like "Am I going to hook up again with the person I hooked up with over there?" In the second act, our cast can't ignore the obvious alliance between Trump's presidential run and Israeli nationalism, but they still mostly have their own crap to deal with. In the third act, however, it's no longer possible to ignore the big questions: They're living in a time when every informed person has to have an opinion about the campaign in Gaza, and these friends are nowhere near as aligned as they once were when the topics were domestic American issues.

In many ways, the sunfish could not have been better-designed as an orca's chew toy. The largest species, the oceanic sunfish Mola mola, can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh up to 6,000 pounds. And yet it is almost unfathomably helpless. Its body resembles a serving platter. It has no tail fin, just a tall dorsal and anal fin, which it flaps in unison to get around. A sunfish often spends its time lounging on its side at the surface of the water, basking in the sun and allowing seabirds to nibble on the parasites that riddle its skin. It has no venom or spines; its only real defense is somewhat thick skin. It's not even a very good swimmer. While a sunfish can reach top speeds of around two miles per hour, an orca can rocket through the water as fast as 35 mph. So it's no surprise that such a large and lumbering fish might offer a wandering pack of orcas some welcome entertainment as they cruise in the clear waters off the Gulf of California. Of course, what is amusing for an orca is terrifying for any non-orca witnesses. Something that might make an orca click and whistle with glee will certainly make an adult woman go "Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Holy shit!" Relatedly, please enjoy the video below.

Some people are fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Las Vegas Raiders.

In some ways, the omnipresence of mystery in everyday life can be comforting. Why is it always cold at the end of the hallway? How did my cat make that noise at 2 in the morning? Why does my car’s brake light keep going out on the driver’s side? Sure, there may be explanations, but I’m not going to be the one to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t grow up watching Ghostbusters aspirationally.  Today’s gossip raises the age-old question: Who you gonna call? If your house might actually be haunted and your kids are freaking out, you’d better come up with an answer. https://youtu.be/tVM4RvqxBak

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life.

VOIRON, France — Last week, my colleague Jonny Long from Escape Collective (EC) remarked that he speaks to more old people at the Tour de France than he does the whole rest of the year. It's true, and not altogether surprising: France has an aging population, so they have old guys, and cycling's culture is one of reverence for the legends of yore, so the old guys are here. Tour crowds aren't monolithic—I find myself pantomiming French toward all manner of locals and tourists alike—yet they skew white, Western European, and older. But really, "old guys" is too narrow a descriptor. What defines the crowds here at the Tour is more the omnipresence and internal diversity of the uncs on display. We got uncs watching the race from the roadside; uncs strolling around with VIP passes; uncs gathering at the start to stare at the bikes, open-mouthed, with hands clasped behind their back like umarells. The press corps is largely composed of unc-type individuals. As I write this from the press room near the finish of Stage 17, I see the strange German reporter who exclusively asks terrible questions and exclusively wears capris and rhinestone-bedazzled shirts; the evil Italian TV guy who does Julius Randle moves while trying to box people out of press scrums; and the two Spanish reporters who keep falling asleep, to the delight of the rest of the Spanish press corps. If you want to know what sorts of people flock to the Tour de France, know the uncs. I am now going tell you about some of my favorites, in the order I encountered them. For organizational purposes, I find it useful to judge our subjects on four axes: the Sunburn Index, Severity of Frenchness, the Indifference Quotient, and Poison Binary. All scores are out of seven, and are self-explanatory, except maybe the last one although it's a binary so you can probably figure it out. Allez.

ESPN staff was hit by another round of layoffs this week, which in some sense barely registers as news given that the network is stuck in a constant state of downsizing. This round of cuts was notable, however, due to some of the recognizable names who were let go: Karl Ravech, David Lloyd, Stephania Bell, Cam Newton, Ryan Clark, and Tom Pelissero were among the cuts. Whether you wish to cheer or jeer any particular departure, there's no denying the significance of ESPN cutting loose someone like Ravech, who has been with the network since 1993 and became synonymous with its baseball coverage. Lloyd started with ESPN in 1997 and has become one of the more familiar faces on SportsCenter; Bell pioneered fantasy-focused injury analysis and turned that into a gig that lasted nearly 20 years; Pelissero is an NFL insider who is just as plugged in as Ian Rapoport and Adam Schefter. These are people sports fans have real relationships with. It is also impossible not to think about these layoffs in the context of some other recent news about ESPN. In June, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported that the network was in the midst of negotiating a new contract for host Pat McAfee, which would pay him more than $60 million per year. Even McAfee himself wasn't immune to making this connection, and attempted to defend his worth during Tuesday's episode of his daily television show: