NowLoop

Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of "public" and "transit," such as Los Angeles. Together, all three cities compose the "Doable But Miserable" tier of Aaron Gordon's breakdown of World Cup stadium transit access, which also elaborates on how the new Los Angeles stadium and its surrounding area, despite proximity to a great deal of transit options, fails to directly connect to many of the most convenient ones. Unlike New York New Jersey and Foxboro, however, Los Angeles was only charging $1.75 for direct service to and from the stadium. This posed some interesting questions. How easy and efficient would it actually be to take public transit—specifically the special shuttle service—in Los Angeles to a World Cup game? Would it be better or worse than "Secaucus Junction"? And so amidst threats made by my beloved colleagues to force me try walking to the Meadowlands for journalism's sake, I fled to the West Coast to instead answer a question that was less likely to result in immediate death and/or severe bodily harm. Here was the situation. I was planning on going to, though not directly attending, the round of 32 game between Spain and Austria in Inglewood. I was staying with a friend in her hotel room in downtown Los Angeles, right next to the Los Angeles Sparks' arena. This is one of the more transit-accessible locations in Los Angeles, with access to four separate Metro stops within a 15-minute walk. Without the direct shuttle, the commute from the hotel to the stadium would, in an ideal world sans traffic, take approximately 25 minutes by car, an hour by transit, and three hours and 40 minutes by foot. (This last point would not be relevant, if not for the fact that as my friend and I were breaking this down, we discovered that one could walk across the entirety of Munich in that same three hour and 40 minute timeframe.)

BARCELONA — "Every swarm needs a face," declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike's new bee mascot, "and every face needs a name." Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was one for the insects. As if to bless Visma for their honeycomb jerseys out of an oblique entomic solidarity, the swarm of cicadas nestled in the scrubby pines atop Montjuïc thrummed Jonas Vingegaard to victory on Saturday's Stage 1. The lanky Dane smashed the Côte du Stade Olympique to win a team time trial somewhat worthy of the name and don the yellow jersey for the first time in three years. The Tour is here, and it's off to the most fascinating possible start. The strangest thing about the Tour starting in Barcelona has nothing to do with the city's Spanishness but rather its size. The Tour is the biggest deal in almost every town, village, and city it graces, but Barcelona, like Paris, is big enough to have a city's worth of people with other stuff going on. You'd have little idea the world's biggest bike race was about to come to town for three days if you'd walked around and checked the vibes in Eixample, Ciutat Vella, or any of the other touristy parts of town on Friday. If pressed to say what major world sporting event was about to happen and you'd done the necessary walking around, you might say an Argentina World Cup watch party. Anyone stepping foot into the KFC whose doors open up as if in enfilade out onto the Sagrada Familia is not going be bothered to put down a drumstick and walk up Montjuïc in the heat of the day. The toasted gaggles I saw out still flickering past 7 a.m. the next day aren't concerning themselves with such a morning sport. But the cicadas know. The Tour opened with a fascinating experiment, and an equally swarming Barcelona crowd greeted the race with enthusiasm, bravado, and bright-pink faces, thanks to event security's confounding decision to take people's bottles of sunscreen at the start zone. I spent a chunk of the sweltering afternoon positioned about halfway up the final climb, thronged by fans, including, rather puzzlingly, a venerable old Dutch guy wearing an orange (?) Red Sox hat (??) sitting regally in a full-cushion armchair (???). Did he haul it up the mountain? Repurpose it from some local scrap heap? A nearby man helpfully pointed out that he was a big-shot sponsor, before proudly telling us that his son Tim Marsman was riding his first Tour in support of Mathieu van der Poel. Exclusionary VIP experiences are an inextricable part of the Tour, so I appreciate that even while this man was perched in a cushy, well-upholstered chair, he was doing so among the people.

Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video model Veo and an AI video tool called Flow, while Aronofsky, like a worrying number of other filmmakers, sought to forge a new and daring path into unknown technological territory by partnering with one of the world's biggest tech companies. In a classically hyperbolic statement crediting the dawn of a new artform with hardware rather than human creativity, Aronofsky said, "Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison's ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras."  The first Primordial Soup project was a short film called Ancestra, directed by Eliza McNitt, which used a combination of AI-generated images, live-action photography, and computer-generated animation to make, in essence, a stupid, eight-minute version of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Ponderous, whispery voiceover narration from a mother to her unborn child plays over vignettes of macro photography showing cells, microorganisms, fish, and nature. Drop into the film without context and you would be forgiven for thinking you were watching a drug commercial.  It seemed like Primordial Soup, its name so brazen in Aronofsky's already infamous pretensions, laid low for the rest of 2025. In January of this year, it announced a series of videos exploring the founding of the United States, tied to the 250th anniversary, in collaboration with the most relevant and cutting-edge news organization in the country, Time magazine. The series is called On This Day … 1776 and has steadily been making waves online, mostly in the YouTube comments. "Wow this is freaking EPIC if you like dogshit!!!" reads one representative entry. "It’s like poop from a butt" is a little repetitive, but "This is the most beautiful thing ive ever seen since i spilled acid in my eyes after i drank all that mercury" communicates a vivid encapsulation of the experience of watching such pointless dreck. 

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as much about territory, empire, and extraction. It's a nation of contradictions, is what I'm getting at: atop those purple mountains' majesty and above those fruited plains lies both beauty and madness, achievement and grift, togetherness and division. And no nation loves its own mythology like America does. You can follow official White House Twitter accounts to see that. It's a mythology that imagines America not as a fight over taxes or even as the "brave" discovery of a definitely-not-lost (please do not say that he got lost) Christopher Columbus, but as a nation literally crafted by white God himself, with little baby Jesus in his loving arms. America especially loves its myths on the Fourth of July: hotdogs, sparklers, baseball, freshly baked apple pie on a kitchen windowsill. Precious, but also convenient, it fits a motif of America as a place not just for white people but that belongs to them. Or to quote my favorite line from The Good Shepherd, on the subject of what it is that WASPs have: "The United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting."

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.

There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set, a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: ovarian for Evert, breast and throat for Navratilova. After beating back the disease, they each go in for a scan. Just before sliding into the tubular machine, Evert hesitates, then removes her cap for comfort, revealing her chemo-bald head. Navratilova follows the exact same instinct at her appointment, taking off her shoes at the last second. In both cases, the discarded article of clothing lay nearest their greatest on-court asset, as portrayed in the doc. Evert is praised for her unwaveringly calm mindset; Navratilova, for her indefatigable legs. The Hall of Famers ended their careers in a deadlock at 18 major titles. Their friendship has survived major finals, sabotage, and now bouts with cancer. When both scans come up clean, this staunch atheist's mind admitted the words "bound souls."  The Final Set, directed by Rebecca Gitlitz, is the latest in a growing line of Netflix tennis documentaries. You had the discontinued Break Point, a messy Carlos Alcaraz in My Way, and last month, Rafa, a revealing look at Rafael Nadal's physical and mental trauma. There's reason to think this new entry into the online streaming canon is the best yet. Navratilova and Evert's narrative is better and more complex—they played 80 damn times, 60 of those in finals—with higher stakes than Alcaraz trying to navigate burnout or even Nadal breaking his body to prolong his career.  Eighty matches! Evert favored a baseline-heavy style, with creative passing shots to defuse her rival's net-rushing and skillful, dipping volleys, though both dipped into the other's bag plenty in search of successful adjustments. Navratilova edged the head-to-head 43-37, a narrow margin that disguises a number of fascinating twists. Evert was first to hit her prime and ran out to 20-5 and 30-18 leads in the rivalry. The friendship flourished during these Evertian summers, generating shared practice sessions and even a doubles partnership. In a moment of frankness, Chris admits it was easy to maintain a relationship during these years because she was better; Martina's observation that Evert "was only really close friends with players who could never beat her" has some bite. Once Navratilova began turning the tide, Evert broke off their occasional doubles partnerships. 

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, starting on July 4, 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."