NowLoop

Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France while flirting with the Swiss and German borders. The route's 54,450 meters of vertical gain make it the third-most demanding Tour of the last 20 years, though that's deceptive, since a lot of that gain is distributed across the many intermediate, hilly stages rather than condensed in set-piece mountain stages. The 26 kilometers of individual time-trialing are also the third fewest of the last 20 years. There are four obvious sprint stages, as well as two stages I am pretty sure will come down to bunch kicks. It's a difficult route, but also quite fun. The second week is where I think I will crack, the third where the race will be decided. As a means of previewing each stage, I'm less interested in picking winners than in discussing the possible shape of each day's racing. I will also award each stage a number of radishes, on a scale from one to seven, to indicate how exciting I think it will be. Allez!

Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to understand who I have been and what I have done, or, rather, what has been done to me. Some days I am not sure even I believe in myself. Am I really so alone in my experience of this world? Have other frogs tasted the noxious nectar of the bombardier beetle or the sickly crackle of the penis barbs of a wasp? Been pierced through the lip and through the eye by the stinger of the northern giant hornet? Escaped the gnashing jaws of their one true love? O, how I yearn to look beyond the walls of my cube and find other frogs who share my story. Is there anyone alive out there? I ribbit out in the night. No one answers. Perhaps there is no one out there at all. Yesterday the gloved hand of God lifted my lid and showered my Cube in soft, coiling mealworms. I ate them in a daze, the nutty flavors of their flesh escaping my taste. I felt lost in the abyss of my life, as if I had been placed in a pot over a low flame doomed never to boil. Life, hot and steaming around me but refusing to spill over or climax. Was this living, or an imitation of it? I looked around the translucent polypropylene walls of my hermitage and the low sky of its lid. My confinement suffocated me. Then, as I turned to gaze at each of the four corners of my Cube, I saw it move, and I broke out in a sweat, abnormally moist even for an amphibian. There, in the naked fluorescence of the lab, was a heap of shit: white and brown, indistinguishable from the leavings of any errant cloaca. I stared, steaming, at this offensive bequest. What sick joke was this! What could I learn from tonguing such filth? Then I blanched in embarrassment. Was this my own shit, abandoned after my morning movement? No, I did not remember evacuating my bowels today. As I blinked I could have sworn the shit twitched. But of course it had not. Shit is not supposed to move. Shit stood still, like a boulder or the bronze statue of the Great Frog Giovanni. I stood as still as shit should and pushed these foolish visions from my mind. I could scarcely croak. It was just us in the naked and sterile Cube, a virulent, contaminating heap that made me stare about my room with distrust. And then the shit began to unfurl.

It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgium men's national soccer team, which takes this adage one fallacy further by being different teams within the same game, and doing it repeatedly so that the cagey analyst just walks away at the start of the national anthem and says, "Tell me when it ends." They got to this point with a tedious draw against Egypt and then doubling down on the tedium with a scoreless draw with Iran; only a mismatched victory over New Zealand allowed them to win their group and advance to Wednesday night.  Thus, it is with exhausted joy mixed with bewilderment that the USMNT prepares for next Monday's round-of-16 showdown with the Belgians, whose performance in their 3-2 extra-time victory over Senegal was very late-model Belgian indeed. They were listless, bland, and seemingly too old to be bold for 85 minutes, during which time they fell behind the far more intrepid and inventive Senegalese, 2-0, and even subbed out their best-ever player (Kevin De Bruyne) and most capable attacker (Jeremy Doku) in what looked like acknowledgement of the inevitable. They were so fried with the game and each other that a second-half hydration break scufflette broke out between Youri Tielemans and Leandro Trossard.

Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer Lauren Fadiman pointed out in The Baffler, the media often uses "Prairieland ICE shooting" as a misleading shorthand for the protest. What actually happened is hard to capture in three words.  On the night of July 4, 2025, about a dozen people held a noise demonstration outside of the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. A few of them vandalized vehicles and guard structures, which cost the detention center around $2,200 to repair. Some set off fireworks in hopes of catching the attention of detainees, causing federal officers to call 911. Most of the protesters dispersed before the cops got there. But one of them, Benjamin "Champagne" Song, said that she saw Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross pull out his gun and aim it at the back of an unarmed protester. Song fired her own gun in response, hitting Gross's shoulder. The officer sustained minor injuries and was released from the hospital a few hours later. Song said she was trying to prevent another Renee Good or Alex Pretti from being "gunned down in the street." And maybe she did. No one died outside of Prairieland that night. Song and others were charged with attempted murder. That happened before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Shortly after, Donald Trump designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and released a counter-terrorism strategy which tied Kirk's death to "extreme transgender ideologies" and identified "violent left-wing extremists" as one of the three major types of terror groups threatening the U.S. government. The Prairieland defendants—composed of trans people, tattoo artists, and zine-makers—served as the perfect embodiments of Trump's specter of domestic terror. Multiple defendants weren't even present at the protest, and much of the evidence presented at trial had nothing to do with the events of that night. Prosecutors weaponized the possession of stickers which said things like "ACAB," membership in the Socialist Rifle Association, the use of the encrypted messaging app Signal, and all-black clothing as evidence that the defendants were an "antifa terror cell."

This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member. The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and anywhere, they like. Except for … One of the biggest events of the summer has been a mystery: When and where are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married? And when does everyone get to celebrate? New details confirmed by The New York Times suggest a multiple-day event at Madison Square Garden, which an entertainment industry executive said Ms. Swift had rented. The entertainment industry executive and another person with knowledge of the matter described the anticipated festivities: On July 2, the plans call for an intimate gathering of about 100 people at the Garden. The next day on July 3, about 1,000 guests would gather there for a splashier celebration, with possible stage appearances. Seriously? You two are getting married at Madison Square fucking Garden? YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent. I also would have known that Drummond was a multi-hyphenate of the oddest sort: a musician/producer/promoter/performance artist/carpenter who, in tandem with Cauty, infamously took a million pounds sterling from their KLF earnings and deliberately lit it on fire. Now, the easiest explanation as to why these two men set a bagful of money on fire is that they were fucking insane. But if you’ve read author John Higgs’s incredible history of The KLF, as I just did, you might be more amenable to its founders’ runaway train of thought. After all, you don’t help stage a 12-hour production about the Illuminati, shepherd Echo & The Bunnymen into the British mainstream, become worldwide pop stars in your own right, and then delete your entire back catalog without something, possibly drug-aided, going on up there. Is it not worth following your muse, even if that muse might come off as superficially cuckoo-nanners? Is there not value in the act of creation, and of creative destruction? In fact, what if art is at its core an act of conjuring? Of magic? Also, why did Tammy Wynette decide to lay down a track for these two lunatics when they cold-called her? THAT, my friends, is (kinda) the subject of this week’s Distraction.

Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the sound of his own voice saying all the famous things that he says. The picture-book binaries that define and proscribe his understanding of the world—big and small, good and bad, hot and cold, rich and poor, white and not white—set the boundaries, but there is not any editorial process beyond that. No one who serves him would ever give him notes, and he would never deign to take them from anyone in his service anyway. Everything he says or does is just a thing that happens; a dishearteningly large portion of political media comes down to making sure that people who follow current events are made aware of it whenever it does. They're good at this, too, which means that you are probably aware that Trump frequently delivers some version of this statement, which is from a speech he made on Dec. 17, 2025: "One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months."

To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia. Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark. In the 1500s, European exploration and subsequent exploitation of other continents introduced Europe to many exotic new species which wound their way into fine art. Unlike other painters of his age, Brueghel avoided including mythical creatures like unicorns in his landscapes. To Brueghel, the newfound abundance of the planet's species was heaven enough. Many Renaissance painters illustrated exotic animals from descriptions, leading to fantastical or off-kilter representations, such as Francesco Bianchi Ferrari's 16th-century Arion riding on a Dolphin, which which calls into question whether Ferrari had ever seen a dolphin or a child. But Brueghel painted many of these foreign creatures from life. In 1606, when Brueghel was appointed to be a court painter for Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella, cousins and co-monarchs of the Habsburg Netherlands, he visited their extensive menagerie and saw animals only recently transported from the Americas. There was a fishpond stocked with tortoises and crayfish. There was an aviary with turkeys, canaries, Indian hens, white and colored peacocks, grouse, pheasants, partridges, nightingales, quails, Icelandic sparrow hawks, a scarlet macaw, and a toucan. There were tiny lion tamarin monkeys, cotton-head tamarins, and marmosets. There were camels as well. Brueghel did not just sprinkle these exotics in his 1613 painting The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark; he placed them in situ. He tried, to the best of his knowledge, to illustrate them interacting with each other and the world just as they would in their own wildernesses. Brueghel's 1611 painting Air represents the apex of such an imagined aviary, with toucans, peacocks, swans, both scarlet and blue-and-yellow macaws, turkeys, owls, and an ostrich. Each of these exquisitely rendered species surrounds the Greek muse Urania, who holds an armillary sphere. But Air is not just the domain of the avian. Four other fliers populate the painting. They are bats, and Brueghel's naturalist bent means the bats, too, are identifiable. The bat in the left corner is a vesper bat, distinguished by its long ears. The two in the middle appear to belong to the family Vespertilionidae. And the bat at the top right looks to be a noctule bat with a bird in its mouth. As such, a new study in PNAS suggests that Brueghel's Air represents the first direct evidence of bird-eating noctule bats.

The Boston Celtics finally found another team serious about trading for Jaylen Brown. Following a couple of weeks where everyone offered their own opinion about the star's true value, the Philadelphia 76ers came in with a real offer—"real" in that it existed and was accepted, not that it was good for the Celtics. Those dreams of acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo or even Jamal Murray in exchange for Brown did not come to pass. Boston's reality is this, as reported Wednesday night by ESPN's Shams Charania: Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-rounders. That's it. That's what the Celtics accepted for the five-time All-Star and 2024 Finals MVP, whom they gave to a conference rival. The LaMelo Ball trade involved more first-rounders. The goddamn Walker Kessler trade involved more first-rounders! The Celtics weren't discreet about their willingness to move Brown, after a season that began with low expectations due to Jayson Tatum's recovery from an Achilles injury suffered in the 2025 playoffs, then became surprisingly competitive, then concluded in embarrassing fashion when the team blew a 3-1 series lead to the Sixers in the first round. Brown reacted to that postseason collapse by going on Twitch to litigate the officiating and complain about how much Joel Embiid flops. Now those two are teammates. The Celtics humiliated themselves as well as the guy they traded away.

It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch their team hunker down, absorb constant pressure from the opponent, and pray to god that they can hold onto the lead. It's not always like this, though. Sometimes the talent disparity between two teams is so vast that the superior squad can go down a man and still control the game, even dominate it in certain phases. It's rare to see this happen, and when it does it serves as a reminder of how far talent, and each individual player's belief in their own talent, can go. So imagine my surprise—my utter, worldview-altering shock—upon seeing the USMNT, the historically talent-deficient and swaggerless international soccer team I've loved but never expected much from, brush away Bosnia and Herzegovina in the knockout round, 2-0, despite being down a man for 36 minutes. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a very good team, and the Dragons were proving it through the first 64 minutes of Wednesday night's game. Folarin Balogun's goal in the 45th minute was the result of a sustained application of pressure from the Americans that could have produced another goal or two had a few breaks gone the other direction. The USMNT was in control, and cruising toward the round of 16, until Balogun was banished from the field thanks to a VAR-induced red card.