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Donald Trump’s 80th birthday weekend didn’t all go well for him, at home or abroad. His name finally got pulled off the Kennedy Center early Saturday, after lots of effort to halt and obscure the removal. And word got out that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that the president desperately wants credit for beautifying was already taken over by algae. Then there’s the matter of his dumbass and deadly Iran invasion ending in his thorough embarrassment. But UFC Freedom 250, the bizarre fight card that Trump hosted on the damn South Lawn of the damn White House, allegedly to celebrate our country’s sestercentennial but really to glorify and enrich himself and his lousy rich friends, went off without much of a hitch. I’m not sure, as the administration and UFC boss Dana White would want me to believe, that my Uncle Pat lost his leg while storming the beach at Normandy so I and 80,000 others could drink bottomless cans of zero-sugar energy drinks on federal land while guys beat the holy hell out of each other. But the bouts, all of which ended in KO's, weren't made any better or worse for their setting. Trump and his UFC pals made endless attempts to link the pugilistic proceedings to patriotism, each effort more hamfisted than the last. The hamfisticuffs peaked with featherweight Secretary of State Marco Rubio comparing hosting the fight card to putting a man on the moon. 

This was the moment when Gianni Infantino, the grubby little cash slag who runs FIFA, could have made himself a noble and even admirable human being in the eyes of a world that absolutely knows he would lick an alley clean for 10 bucks. And of course, he passed on it because he checked his Venmo and nothing new was in the queue. All he had to do was announce that Cape Verde's 0-0 draw with Spain (yeah, you read that right) was actually a win, and the Tubaroes Azuis (a cool name on its face) would be awarded the three points that would have come with a victory. Because it was. An enormous victory. Bigger in its way than the Knicks winning the NBA title. In fact, something far closer to your local community college's team winning the NBA title. Instead, and the standings continue to prove this no matter how many times we refresh the page, all they got was the traditional one point for not losing their nation's first-ever World Cup match, which came against one of the favorites to win the whole thing. That's a miscarriage of justice of the first magnitude, and Infantino is still, well, you know.

It's hard to explain what it's been like walking around New York City over the past two weeks. Even if the Knicks don't specifically come up, the spirits are high. Knicks gear and colors are everywhere, the people are smiling, the mayor is Muslim, the bagels are Jewish, etc. During the actual Finals games, every establishment with a TV was completely packed out, full of people losing their minds in communal celebration of the team and the city. I watched Game 2 in a Brooklyn sports bar that was so full they had to bring in a bouncer. The people were literally spilling out of these places and taking the party into the streets. I watched Game 3 from the post-operation room in a hospital after having an ablation procedure, where the Jamaican nurses in Knicks colors were losing their minds at the refs for their perceived special treatment of Victor Wembanyama. When Game 4 closed with that incredible Hand-of-God ending, I was so jacked that I ran out of my apartment and onto Nostrand Avenue just to high-five anyone I saw. I heard fireworks, honking cars, a flapping Knicks flag a fan was waving in the middle of the street, and one guy blasting the Lox Verzuz version of "Who Shot Ya?" It all led into Saturday and another trip into the city, Lower Manhattan this time, where within a tight radius there were multiple overfilled sports bars, a screening in the middle of a basketball court, and someone projecting the game from a truck parked on the street. For most of the night, I did not think the Knicks would wrap it up then and there. At the start of the game both teams looked tight, and even as the Spurs pulled ahead, it never looked like either team had full control. It wasn't until the Knicks tied it in the fourth that it started to feel like it would happen. My roommate, who couldn't care less about sports, had gotten swept up in the city-wide Knicks fever and desperately wanted them to finish it off, if for no other reason than to put an end to the adrenaline spikes and crashes. When it happened, and the Knicks actually became NBA champions, it was surreal. The city felt like it was exploding in ecstasy all at once, all together. The beer flowed and the fireworks popped. People sat on rooftops and hung off signposts, yelling in happiness. Weed and cigarillo smoke filled the air. For once, hearing "Empire State of Mind" didn't piss me off. The streets were completely overtaken, without a cop in sight. My roommate said it looked like the 2020 protests.

It is easy to get lost in the scope of things when it comes to Sir Lewis Hamilton. There are the championships (seven, depending on how you count) and the race wins (106) and the longevity (19 years and counting), and his victory at the 2026 Barcelona Grand Prix this Sunday only added to that already unwieldy list of records. Lewis Hamilton's first race win in a Ferrari! Lewis Hamilton, age 41, adding his name to the list of oldest F1 race winners! But put aside the legacy for one moment, and just focus on the race itself. If there was a romantic quality to Hamilton's last (on-track) victory, which took place nearly two years ago at Silverstone—a masterclass but also a miracle; a frantic wet weather classic at his home race; a welcome surprise—Barcelona, by comparison, was frighteningly mundane. In terms of the race situation, the only confounding factor was the sweltering heat; it was also Barcelona, which may as well be permanently subtitled "frighteningly mundane." Fortune was kind to Hamilton throughout, but only as much as it is to most race winners. And he won anyway. Or, in other words, the greatest surprise of Hamilton's victory was that it was barely a surprise at all. That would have been unfathomable during the ground-effect era and especially during Hamilton's miserable, miserable, miserable first year at Ferrari, which felt so much like an omen of the end. But given a new set of regulations and a new race engineer and the (presumably) second-best car on the grid, Hamilton has, like a perennial, somehow come back into bloom. After two consecutive P2 finishes and Mercedes' power-unit reliability issues, it was only a matter of time before Hamilton would get a victory of his own. And here, in Barcelona, was the proof: Lewis Hamilton is doing Lewis Hamilton things again.

Soccer is all about momentum. The distinguishing aspect of its competitive structure is that it's unsegmented, with a simple, 15-minute halftime bisecting two 45-minute blocks. The neophyte might see a goalless desert stippled with oases distributed seemingly at random and out of nowhere, but the joy of watching soccer is that the shifting sands of the game operate on the invisible logic of momentum. As the 20 field players fight and scrap for every meter of turf, patterns of play emerge, and eventually, things make sense. Until the 2026 World Cup, that is. This World Cup has seen the debut of mandatory three-minute hydration breaks, interspersed at the midpoint of each half, at the 22nd and 67th minutes. While the breaks themselves are not new, their ubiquity is. The new rule was rolled out following last summer's infernal Club World Cup, a dress rehearsal for the real thing played in oven-like conditions that dozens of participants criticized as straight-up unhealthful. In that tournament, referees were deputized to stop matches in order to give everyone water breaks if the weather was too punishing. This time around, every single match will stop twice, whether it's 71 degrees and breezy in Santa Clara or 101 and punishingly humid in Houston. Keeping players safe in extreme temperatures is important, and competitions and organizers must adapt as climate change makes summer sporting events increasingly dangerous. That said, if you think FIFA is doing this for any other reason than to make money, you likely are the sort of person who calls it the "FIFA World Cup" at every turn and cheers when your favorite brand makes a cool commercial. In practice, the hydration breaks serve as timeouts against which broadcasters can sell ads. I have watched the first week's worth of games on Fox, which cuts away for a long block of commercials every time.

Victor Wembanyama is maybe just kind of a corny guy. I think we are all going to have to get accustomed to that. His taste in reading material could scarcely be more embarrassing shy of, like, pickup-artist instruction manuals. He seems to go out of his way to cultivate a public Man of Sophistication image, which is among other things hilariously at odds with what he's reading. He can be tediously smug when things are going well—the "I'm in your head!" thing from Game 4 will endure like a tattoo on his forehead forever—and the rest of the time has developed an ugly penchant for dirty shit that is unbefitting a world-class athlete and, again, makes for an unflattering contrast with the whole Serene Warrior Monk thing. Two weeks ago the 2026 NBA Finals seemed like they might be his coronation, and oh boy, were they ever not that. The general response to the New York Knicks defeating Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs and claiming the city's first NBA championship since 1973 has been, by and large, joyful and celebratory, which is great. In its shadow, though, a consensus seems to have formed—online, if not among the relatively tiny and generally more cautious crowd of people who get paid in part to seek journalistic access to pro athletes—that these Finals exposed Wembanyama as something of a sucker and a fraud. He faded badly in second halves throughout a short series that was characterized if not defined by his team, well, fading badly in second halves. The Spurs led for more than 70 percent of the series's total game time, including by double figures in all five games, and won just one of those; they lost all three games they hosted. More specific to the gangly prodigy in question, New York's brawny frontcourt pushed Wemby around and successfully relegated the sport's tallest and lengthiest player to the game's geographic periphery for its key stretches. While Jalen Brunson—5-foot-10 on his best day, looks like he should be wearing a sweater over an Oxford shirt and teaching elementary school—was taking games in hand with Captain Ahab–grade fanaticism, dragging his team to a championship as much via sheer refusal to lose it as by anything else, Wembanyama found himself reduced to a noodular stationary jump-shooter, a mere cog in his own team's janky and coughing machinery. A few moments before OG Anunoby found in himself the superhuman wherewithal to tip in one of the most extraordinary and heroic game-winning baskets in league history, Wembanyama bricked a pair of free throws that might have made that game-winner impossible. While his own teammate Dylan Harper—younger than him and a rookie—was making huge plays and gutsy shots and keeping the Spurs afloat in Game 5, Wembanyama was setting screens of no particular effectiveness and getting stonewalled before he could even roll as far as the free-throw line. He did not, in short, spend these Finals covering himself in glory.

The story of the 2026 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes is that of a team that made a lot of smart decisions over a period of many years and was eventually rewarded. Sebastian Aho, drafted in the second round in 2015, has been the foundational forward ever since they started making the playoffs as likeable upstarts back in 2018-19. Head coach Rod Brind'Amour, whose first year on the job coincided with the beginning of their playoff appearance streak, has spearheaded and maintained an effective and attractive style of play in which Carolina consistently outworks their opposition to earn the majority of a game's chances. And while there was no obvious path through the second- and third-round roadblocks that the Canes continuously hit, the more recent moves that they made—signing Nikolaj Ehlers, drafting Jackson Blake in the fourth round, getting Logan Stankoven from Dallas—look like works of genius after their offensive contributions to this Cup run. All of those ingredients got Carolina into the Final for the first time since 2006. But they needed one more burst of inspiration to bring it home. Goaltender Brandon Bussi, an undrafted 27-year-old who had never made it out of the minors before this season, came on in relief after two months on the bench to replace a burned-out and banged-up Frederik Andersen. He was the winning goalie in the final three games of this series, letting in fewer pucks each start to lead up to a clinching shutout in Game 6. His entrance timed exactly with the team's rise from its lowest point. Starting with Game 3's four-goal comeback that ended unsuccessfully in overtime, the Canes outscored the Knights 16-6 with Bussi in the crease. That's how a guy becomes a Stanley Cup hero. Brind'Amour's switch over to Bussi, even if it was mostly forced, contrasts dramatically with Vegas head coach John Tortorella's stubborn refusal to swap in Adin Hill for Carter Hart. Hill, admittedly, suffered through a gnarly regular season in which VGK almost missed the playoffs entirely. But he was a solid starter the year before, and the man who had helped Vegas win the Cup back in 2023. Maybe he wouldn't have made a difference, but asking if he might have been useful is certainly not "the stupidest question I've heard," as Torts put it when he so fiercely tried to protect Hart after Game 5.

Despite its apparent ubiquity, the career of "online influencer" is so young that the first generation of people to use that title are not only still working, but still young. Ingrid Nilsen was one of the very first beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, and the work she did in her late teens and early 20s created the blueprint for what the industry has become today. A few of her highlights: She was the first online creator to work with CoverGirl, and she interviewed President Obama. Her coming-out video in 2015 went mega viral, and she invented Vlogmas, which is a daily vlogging challenge still used by thousands of creators every December. She had more than 3 million YouTube subscribers, and in 2020, she quit.

The expanded field at the 2026 World Cup is, from a competitive standpoint, a disaster. Upping the team count from 32 to 48 has robbed the best part of any World Cup, the group stage, of its famous intensity and tension. Even an extra round of knockout games won't salvage things, given that eight third-place teams will qualify for that, and there surely won't be eight good third-place teams. The expansion of the field is a blatant money grab by FIFA, and it's a real disappointment to see the way that the World Cup has been warped by greed. Now try telling that to Curacao, which scored its first-ever World Cup goal in its first-ever World Cup match against none other than Germany. Try telling that team, and that fanbase, that this is all terrible and bad for the sport: https://youtu.be/taI5dp_0C0Y?si=aLEEOOvKbRtzkl2S&t=105

Aren’t you happy to see our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Patrick Maher, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Patrick is a software engineer and sporadic crossword constructor who lives in Manhattan. His hobbies include having two young children and doing whatever they want. He still plans on watching the Jets this year for some reason. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."