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Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling novelist Paul Tremblay, author of the new Dead But Dreaming Of Electric Sheep, onto the show this week. The idea was that, with no top-of-the-news sports to talk about, we could talk about basically anything. And so we did. The episode begins with talk about Paul's prostate cancer experience, complete with thematically appropriate Dreamcatcher comps, an arachnid surgical robot, and a surgeon no-selling his pre-operation attempt at a joke. It is a good deal funnier than it had any right to be, even before the phrase "penile rehab" was spoken aloud. We also spoke about his experience getting roasted by teenagers while continuing to teach high school math after authoring several bestselling horror novels, what it's like to sue OpenAI, and what his own lengthy deposition in that case revealed about big AI's legal strategy and effectively nonexistent capacity to read a room. We also discussed his new book, invented a verb form of Weekend At Bernie's, and talked about the thrills and relatively mild indignities of the contemporary book tour.

There's a Massachusetts–based restaurant chain that offers a free kids meal—kid must be present, limit two per party—the day after a Boston Red Sox win. When the team was scuffling at the bottom of the AL East and manager Alex Cora was fired for a dismal start, the promotion became an easy joke: The children of New England were hungry. So hungry. Offensive struggles and one-run losses had turned them into the wee ragamuffins of Oliver Twist. But around the end of June, after dropping two of three to the lowly Colorado Rockies, something changed: The Red Sox began providing meals. They swept the New York Yankees in a four-game series in Boston, the finale an invigorating win courtesy of Jarren Duran's walk-off hit, then added one more victory against the Washington Nationals for a nice little five-game streak. They did drop two games to the Nats, one in which Cade Cavalli was a little racist, but from that point on, the Red Sox didn't lose. From July 3 to the night of July 22 (including the all-star break), Boston won 15 straight, improving their record from 37-48 to 52-48 and putting themselves firmly within the wild card race. The streak tied a franchise record last accomplished in 1946, back when Ted Williams was having an MVP season. For the majority of this month, the children of New England have feasted on cheesy flatbreads and chicken tenders—perhaps even a fried shrimp for the more adventurous eaters. They've gone Augustus Gloop mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOkpaVgs248

LIV Golf's honchos, the poor suckers, are still out there scrambling around, looking for investors to keep their dipshit tour afloat after the Saudi Public Investment Fund suddenly booted them into the wilderness back in April. Now that LIV Golf has lost its utility as a sportswashing spectacle and as a wedge for market disruption, it is left with zero authentic value whatsoever. Nobody was clamoring for more golf, for golf with stupid team names, or for much noisier golf. A formerly endlessly resourced and attention-bloated LIV Golf couldn't bring the PGA Tour to its knees and thus force a merger, and now it is left to make an argument for itself, an argument that became comical the moment the tour was declared a dud by the most brazen and profligate entity in world sports. If the ROI on LIV is too lousy for the PIF, buddy, they are simply FUBAR, and possibly SOL. Things are spiraling. LIV Golf was recently sued by one of its vendors, a Canadian technology company called Mobii Systems Group (the full complaint can be read at the bottom of this post). Mobii and LIV Golf signed a contract in January 2025 for the former to provide "integrated broadcast technology, streaming services, platform licenses, and related support services at all LIV Golf events in 2025 and 2026." In the complaint, filed July 17 in Florida, Mobii says that LIV Golf has been falling behind on invoices for services rendered, to the tune of approximately $925,000, and in late May attempted to squirrel out from under the remainder of the deal, covering the last handful of 2026 events. The complaint says that Mobii's "infrastructure, personnel, platform licenses, and cloud services" were built, tuned, and sized for the LIV Golf engagement, and that they are thus eating a huge loss of revenue, offset basically not at all by the sudden unexpected opening of their schedule. That plus the huge bill for unpaid invoices, says the complaint, adds up to over $1 million in damages. There is at least one grimly funny highlight from the mass of exhibits attached to Mobii's complaint: In a letter from May sent to LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil, Mobii CEO Greg Schultz describes getting a runaround from LIV's accounting department that will be familiar to anyone who has ever accidentally fielded a phone call from someone to whom they owe money:

In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball. It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by, or has never actually met Bam Adebayo. Every shovel has a name, a job, and a hole that needs digging and filling repeatedly so that the shovelers can try to seem indispensable to the league's information system, at least until such time as they get hired by some team to do some nonsensical job that will be replaced by AI by next Thursday lunch. What you won't find, though, are owner pundits—people who know or pretend to know what the billionaires are planning, when they're planning it, and why it needs to be planned. Let's call it, for lack of a popular alternative, the study of advanced bastardology, a largely untapped motherlode of venality that makes the basketball seem entirely ancillary to the actual work. We know, for instance, that Jimmy Dolan is a spectacular GRA (if I spot you "giant" and "raging," can you figure out the "A"?) no matter the subject or the moment, but he's the most recent doof to lead a parade. We know Tom Dundon can hear a C-note hit the snow and send one of the interns or worse, one of the children whose names he had engraved on the Stanley Cup, to dig it out with their face. We know Patrick Dumont looks like a manager at a FedEx dropoff depot whose only apparent service to the business of basketball was to successfully pitch Nico Harrison into the chipper-shredder of public opinion after the Luka Doncic deal. We definitely know that Adam Silver is the front-facing corporate shill who would sign off on any of the aforementioned owners setting off explosives in a petting zoo and then defend the subsequent shower of animal bits as the necessary cost of doing business in the modern NBA. And we know that they all want new, publicly funded arenas by next week because they don't want the other owners to make fun of them at league meetings.

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 afterward 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.