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This past Sunday, Alexander Zverev won his first major title. On the surface, the 29-year-old's Roland-Garros victory is the story of a player who, after roughly a decade of high expectations, accomplished the signature feat in his sport while benefiting from injuries and early upsets that removed the biggest obstacles in the men's bracket from his path. Perhaps it's the story of an elite athlete succeeding despite a childhood type-1 diabetes diagnosis that requires him to regulate his blood sugar levels during competition, or the story of a player who finally conquered the nerves that previously undermined his talent once he arrived at the late stage of a major. But for many journalists and a large swath of the tennis-watching public, it's also the story of a player who has faced allegations of domestic violence from two previous partners. The first accuser, Olya Sharypova, took her allegations public in 2020 through interviews with journalist Ben Rothenberg. Sharypova accused Zverev of repeated instances of physical abuse, including him punching and choking her. There were no legal charges; the ATP commissioned an independent investigation and concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to substantiate the allegations. (Zverev filed a lawsuit against Rothenberg in German court over the reporting; the case is "winding down," according to Rothenberg.) Brenda Patea, the second accuser and mother of Zverev's daughter, took him to trial in Germany. Court records obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that Patea accused Zverev of pushing and strangling her. At every turn, Zverev has claimed that the allegations are false, and, as recently as this past weekend, he has claimed that he has been proven innocent in court, even though the 2024 out-of-court settlement does not constitute a ruling on his innocence or guilt.

After a Texas court granted Brendan Sorsby an injunction against the NCAA's suspension of his eligibility due to his gambling activity, the reaction inside and outside of college sports was intense. At Texas Tech, they hear you and they're listening. That's why the school assembled a braintrust to record a 20-minute State of the Union address to assure the public that the school truly has the best of intentions, by welcoming a guy who gambled on his own team back into the fold. https://twitter.com/TechAthletics/status/2065245076280750107 To some, like the commissioners and athletic directors who have decried the judge's ruling and called for stern punishment for Sorsby in spite of it, it is a gross miscarriage of justice that an athlete could directly compromise his sport's integrity by betting on his own team's games but suffer little consequence. But to Texas Tech's braintrust—which includes Red Raiders football coach Joey McGuire, university president Lawrence Schovanec, senior associate athletic director for student-athlete health and wellness (whatever that means) Grant Stovall, and AD Kirby Hocutt—all of this is purely about the best way to treat Sorsby's mental illness, which would naturally involve the healing power of college football and Texas Tech not having to eat its $6 million investment in Sorsby.

There are very few people on Earth who want to see Carter Hart in net for Vegas. Most of them are Golden Knights fans, but no one cares what they think because they are Golden Knights fans. One of them is John Tortorella, who has displayed a deep and occasionally baffling level of loyalty to the goalie, likely dating to their time in Philadelphia. The only others are the Carolina Hurricanes, because they have been beating the shit out of Hart every night and would like that to continue. Hart had already made history by being the first goalie to give up at least four goals in each of the Stanley Cup Final's first four games, so what did he do in Game 5 Thursday night? Gave up four more, as fans gleefully chanted "No means no," as they have before in this series. I find the chant in poor taste, but certainly not for reasons that involve sympathy for Hart. There could be some pathos in watching a man steadfastly earn himself the undisputed title of worst goalie in Cup Final history, were it another man. But it's Hart, whose role in the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal came with an acquittal, but also a fairly clear-eyed consensus in the NHL world that the limits of basic decency did not extend to allowing Hart to resume his career as if nothing happened. That consensus did not apply to the Golden Knights; it rarely seems to. They signed Hart in October 2025, nine days after he became eligible to sign, and put him in net on Dec. 2, one day after he became eligible to play.

Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. The Gardens, which opened in Philadelphia in September 2025, say that "the objects on view respond to architectural moments rather than art historical narratives.” It is not a gallery presented with an eye toward education, but a space built to contain the work and amplify it. In other words, it is a vibe. The building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, twists and turns in surprising ways. Outside, massive sculptures sit gracefully in pockets of the building. Inside, the ceiling is low in places to compress a work that towers in the middle. The balcony from the second floor looks out at eye level to the Alexander Calder mobiles hung from the ceiling. Down the stairs, you can look up at them from underneath as they rotate.  On the lower floor, a few of these "architectural moments" take the shape of notches in the walls, rounded and concave like the inside of an egg. It is only after wandering amongst the mobiles, your neck bent back so that your eyes can gaze up, that you might notice these little spaces, just deep enough to tuck yourself into. They are places to perch—not quite benches, but sills. The architects have built these spaces as if they are suction-cup platforms stuck to a window, and we are their beloved, uninterested housecat who must be encouraged to observe the world outside ourselves. 

[STEPS OUT ONTO THE STAGE WITH A WIRELESS MICROPHONE ATTACHED TO MY CHEEK] Meet Andre. Andre is a teddy bear, but one with a secret. Would you like to tell everyone your secret, Andre? [SQUEEZES THE BEAR]

On Sunday in Monaco, Alpine's Pierre Gasly received pit-lane speed penalties totaling 10 seconds, which demoted him down to P7; on Thursday, Formula 1 reporter Chris Medland reported that Alpine's appeal for a review of those penalties had been deemed admissible. From that point it was obvious shenanigans would abound, no matter the review's result, and here shenanigans have arrived: On Friday, the stewards confirmed that the penalties had been incorrectly given, and rescinded them, promoting Gasly back to the podium place, P3, in which he'd finished the race. As a result, Red Bull's Isack Hadjar has been demoted from the podium back into P4. To start from the beginning, the Monaco Grand Prix saw five drivers from four different teams receive penalties for speeding in the pit lane. All five drivers were held to have exceeded the speed limit by 0.1 kph, and Gasly, who received two penalties, also exceeded it by 0.4 kph the second time around. This proved to be one of the most dramatic and pivotal factors in the race. Left unclear was how so many teams wound up making the same error with the pit limiter, to the point where the stewards queried race control after the third penalty. Well, the answer, as provided by the stewards in the Gasly decision, was that Formula One Management, the Official Timekeeping Supplier (sick position) of the formula, just seriously botched it. FOM stated prior to the race that the length of the first timing zone in the pit lane—where every single speeding penalty occurred—was 2,692 cm, accurate to the centimeter, but LIDAR scans found that the actual distance was 2,615 cm, or 77 cm shorter than initially stated. This then led to the 60.1 kph speeding penalty that all the drivers received.

One thing that's always fun at a World Cup is a good old-fashioned clash of styles. With so many different teams, and so many different managers and tactics and players, no two sides play quite alike, and so a central tension of any match becomes the stylistic conflict. Imagine my delight when it took only the second match of this tournament to find what could very well prove the summer's starkest contrast of styles, as South Korea's Real Hooper Shit ran headfirst into the Czechia set-piece wall and, somehow some way, came out ahead 2-1, thanks to the power of having better players playing better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztKvwczBmqk Both of these teams have well-established identities, and given that it was the first match of the tournament for both, there was no reason to veer from the default gameplan just yet. For South Korea, that meant a wide-open 3-4-2-1 formation that gave the side's technical players plenty of space and options with which to work their magic. For Czechia, it meant almost the exact opposite, despite an almost exactly equivalent 3-4-2-1 formation; the Czechs were rigid and compact, aiming to utilize not so much individual brilliance but more the blunt-force instrument of crosses and set pieces.

Knicks mania is in the air, but how does that affect local businesses beyond the obvious cases, like bars packed out on random weeknights? Beer is a constant, but what about print media? To find out, I stopped by Casa Magazines, a well-loved corner store in the West Village where you can procure pretty much anything printed, from the daily tabloids to esoteric small-batch fare. I spoke to Casa content producer Tammy David and staffer Mirza Ayan Baig about how the New York Knicks' Finals run has changed business at the store. The Knicks had also been in the postseason the previous three years, but it wasn't until they earned a Finals berth that buyer behavior began to drastically change. Customers walked in not seeking out a particular publication, but the team in general. "Sometimes they were like, 'Do you have any New York Knicks?' 'No.' It's like looking for gum or vape—they move on to the next," David said. The Knicks covers of the New York Post and New York Daily News, with their classically brash headlines, were selling out within an hour of the store's 8 a.m. opening, sometimes even within 15 minutes. They were so sought after that ahead of Game 4, David put on social media an instructional video for customers to grasp where in the (very small) store the tabloids are stocked, minimizing confusion. But as popular as the tabloids are, Casa's biggest explosion in sales was a weekly magazine. The cover of the New Yorker's June 1 issue is a Mark Ulriksen illustration of Jalen Brunson, flexing over a lineup of storied Knicks. That was the one.

It's time for the World Cup. We've been previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. As the largest event humanity has ever come up with, it's safe to say that the World Cup is a big deal. In some way or other the tournament connects to literally everything, from politics, to culture, to war, to art, to philosophy, to biology, to economics, and on and on. As such, it can sometimes get overlooked that, on its most fundamental level, the World Cup is just a collection of soccer games. And the simplest explanation of a game of soccer is that the team with the best players usually wins. That is why Spain is the clear favorite. At this World Cup, Spain has the best players.

Well, it had to happen eventually. We'd been putting it off and pushing it back and wallowing earhole-deep in the adrenaline rush of it all, bouncing from Las Vegas to San Antonio to Raleigh to Manhattan in a poker game in which we'd finally reached the rarefied land of the eight-bet, but in our vacant, decrepit, spider-encrusted souls we all knew it would end up here: A normal game, played normally, with normal deeds, normal screeds and a normal result. Hardly seemed worth it in the end. Then again, after 10 full days of increasingly preposterous in-play behaviors and performances by the Golden Knights, Spurs, Hurricanes, and Knicks, something and someone had to give. And Thursday night, in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, that something and someone was the Knights. Carolina slowly but surely chokeslammed Vegas, 4-2, by playing sharp but thrill-free hockey that left nothing for the perpetually dissatisfied. After ceding the first period to Vegas—a first for the slow-starting Knights—the Canes seized the second, also a novel development, then took a two-goal lead and held it. They finally won a second period. Their best players, Andrei Svechnikov and Sebastian Aho, were finally their best players. The better team during the run of play won as they should, in regulation, and comfortably. Not that there weren't moments of "Well, ain't that a hoot?" Erling Haaland, the world's most lethal striker, took an evening away from the Norwegian World Cup camp because he'd heard that American playoff games are drunk. Carolina's newbie goaltender Brandon Bussi burnished his legend as the new-age mini-version of Ken Dryden by coming from nowhere to give the Canes a suddenly clear advantage in net. They gave up three power-play opportunities to the Knights, all because they kept shooting the puck into the crowd. And most ridiculous of all, ABC's P.K. Subban maintained his place as America's human rummage sale, using Cam Newton’s cast-offs to distract us from the fact that his next observation of substance will give him an even two.