NowLoop

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't panicking. "I don't think it's anything drastic. It's just a play here, a play there, a call here, a call there," he said after Atlanta's 88-83 loss to Golden State on Saturday, his team's fifth straight loss. "I think as soon as we have one game where we shoot it the way we normally shoot it, I think then we'll be through the struggles that we're seeing right now." I won't pretend this circular logic is especially satisfying, but it's true that a coach can only do so much when their team is shooting the way Atlanta is right now. Across those five losses, the Dream shot 26 percent from three and just 38.4 percent from the field—not what you want. It was a bit of a surprise that the team won't have any players starting in the All-Star Game later this month, but the snub has not exactly powered the team's wing duo to greatness. Allisha Gray is shooting 16 percent from three and 35.2 percent from the field in this losing stretch. Rhyne Howard, a stout defender, found herself on the wrong end of a couple of Gabby Williams masterclasses in the past couple weeks. Smesko might feel calm because he knows the team isn't in its fully realized form yet. Brionna Jones, expected to start at center, has been out recovering from knee surgery she had before the start of the season. We'll soon find out how much of Atlanta's problems are due to plain incompleteness: Jones was a full participant in Tuesday's Dream practice. 

For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round-of-16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anything other than something we've never seen before feels, well, terrible. Messi spent the first 79 minutes of the match misplaying passes, dribbling to nowhere, missing yet another penalty—boy, am I glad that he made his two penalties in the 2022 World Cup final, or we'd never hear the end of it—and watching helplessly as Egypt hunkered down, rode goalie Mostafa Shobeir through some incredible saves, and scored not once but twice. Seventy-nine minutes had gone, and while Argentina controlled the balance of play, the scoreboard didn't lie. Egypt had been deadlier and more efficient with its chances, while Argentina looked out of ideas and, crucially, almost out of time. That's the thing about having Messi on your team, though: Until the final whistle blows, there is always time. In this case, all it took was four minutes for Messi to do what he has done more than perhaps any player in the history of soccer: rescue his team from the jaws of defeat through sheer willpower and otherworldly talent. In four minutes, Messi roared to life. All it took was one dribble where he looked like Young Messi—or at least the Younger Messi who dismantled poor Josko Gvardiol at the 2022 World Cup—to wake him up. That dribble didn't end in a goal, but fast-forward just a few second later and his talent would make the difference. The first Argentina goal was actually the kind of assist that Messi doesn't do all that often, which makes it all the more entertaining to watch. This was just a simple cross, cutting inside on his left from the right wing before lobbing it at a perfectly timed Cristian Romero run, which allowed the Tottenham captain to head the ball with enough power to get through Shobeir's save attempt.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more. Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business. Your letters:

On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards, watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at Defenders Academy, a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court.  Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a courtroom has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her back to share her talents with public defenders. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound: Players are probably less likely to do a racismo if their lips can be easily read in the moment, potentially heading off the kind of paralytic he-said-he-said that protected Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni in his racism incident with Vinícius last season. Alas, FIFA's anti-racism protocols hold no sway in the real world, and they especially have no jurisdiction in the realm of good old-fashioned politician racism. Enter Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, a member of the country's center-left Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico party, who posted (and later deleted) a brutally offensive rant directed at Kylian Mbappé following Paraguay's 1-0 loss to France. As translated by The Madrid Zone: This brute hasn't even learned to write. Instead of breastmilk, he grew up sucking on coconuts, and the most educated creatures he ever heard were chimpanzees. You should've given him the middle finger, Orlando Gill (Paraguay GK). A colonized Cameroonian, pretending to be French, resentful, newly rich, arrogant, and ugly. He was nervous and scared to death all game, like his whole team. They didn't even manage to score a single goal, until they got lucky with a penalty. The only thing many of us blame the team for is not giving him a full-handed slap at the end of the game. I'm not even a football fan.

Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well now, that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to be a United States Senator, a position he has held since 1985. Could one not then argue that he is in fact the livingest guy around? What after all is "a pulse"? Many things throb rhythmically. That is nothing special. That is not what makes something alive. A disco beat throbs. Is a disco beat "alive"? Does it have highly remunerated aides whose entire livelihood depends on its continuing ability to occupy elected office, who will attest to it being "alive," three weeks after paramedics traveled to the disco beat's house to treat someone there who had gone into cardiac arrest, and with no one having seen the disco beat in public since then? You have really got a lot to think about right now, in my opinion. A heartbeat after all is a rhythm. A series of beats. In between the beats, it is not beating. Is it "dead" in those intervals? What if some of the intervals are longer than others? Athletes and the very fit often have slower heartbeats than others, and this is a sign of health. Bear that in mind when you feel qualified to draw conclusions about a heart that beats very slowly. If you are not jumping out from behind a shower curtain to screech "Dead! Dead! Dead!" at LeBron James in between each of his mighty and well-spaced heart contractions, then to state as fact that the brazenly evil avatar of obstructive minority rule in the United States is a corpse in the interval (three weeks and counting) between two of his even more powerfully spaced-out heartbeats makes you a hypocrite. I do not think that is the kind of example you are trying to set for your children.

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and went inside. This decision, if it was in fact a choice or rather the result of a chance oceanic current, offered some obvious benefits to the baby crab. A plastic bottle offers precious shelter to something so small, soft-shelled, and delicious. So the crab stayed, feeding on whatever else swam or drifted into the bottle's small opening. As the months went by, the crab grew larger. On July 15, 2022, a group of researchers sailed a small boat off the coast of Sesoko Island in Okinawa, Japan. They were searching for oceanic nurseries: floating objects like driftwood and sargassum that shelter larval fish in that vulnerable stage of their lives. The researchers saw the bobbing whitish bottle was surrounded by larval fish, which they scooped up with a net. There were two baby rough triggerfish, five rainbow runner, five Indo-Pacific sergeant, and one freckled driftfish—a veritable daycare. And then the researchers peeked inside the bottle, which was furred with algal growth and encrusted in barnacles. And they saw the crab. She was a three-spot swimming crab, about the size of a business card, and she was missing her third leg. It was immediately clear she could not escape via the mouth of the bottle, which was less than an inch wide. The researchers wondered how she'd gotten inside the bottle in the first place, and how long she'd been there. Their investigation was published in the journal Ecosphere.

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is. Well, in the wake of Monday night's dopeslap in Seattle, in which the USMNT was the face and Belgium the gloved hand, there are so many lessons to absorb, and that's even after you leaven off the top 35 percent of the vitriol, which is just snark from late-to-the-party nitwits. That's the first thing, maybe—that when you open the tent to everyone, the quality of the guests necessarily drops. The amount of abuse the USMNT will take as an adjunct to the amount of abuse it took from the allegedly past-their-sell-by-date Belgians will be impressive, and will lead necessarily to a harsher reassessment of soccer in America, and how it is never going to amount to anything, and how you should just buy more beer and wait for training camp. And for some of you, maybe, that should be the lesson. You came to see what the party was like. It was fun for a while, then it came time to clean the hall and you fled like a rabbit, saying the party sucked anyway. It was just a way for you to kill time until training camp, and good for you, we suppose. You got something out of it, even if it wasn't anything satisfying.

Perhaps it's a sign from Mother Nature that the two flagship events of the Philadelphia's Wawa Welcome America Festival for the semiquincentennial were derailed by weather. Maybe she was telling us to stop this embarrassing exhibition of unbridled nationalism and look inward. But if she thought that she could succeed in getting Americans to self-reflect, even by replicating the conditions of the depths of hell where our leaders will surely burn, she was sorely mistaken. How naive! Clearly she has never truly contended with the levels of blinding patriotism of the average American, or the masochistic tenacity of a Defector intern who will sacrifice anything to get the story. Despite the temperature reaching nearly 100 degrees in the middle of the day, I embarked on my expedition. The closer I got to Philadelphia's Old City, the deeper I ventured into a different version of the United States than the one I was used to. This version looked like the mind of Uncle Sam suffering from post-concussion syndrome. The air was filled with the smell of fried dough, port-a-potties, and the dissolution of the EPA. Scattered "U-S-A" chants carried across the neighborhood, just in case anyone forgot what country we lived in. Street vendors and Christian proselytizers stood side by side on the pavement, in a heartwarming testament to the American spirit and the Protestant ethic. Sunburnt and khaki-clad families walked around while wearing garish AI-generated shirts that featured uncomfortably ripped George Washingtons, or said things like "I can't hear you over the sound of my freedom." Even a food delivery robot trucked along with a little American flag.

It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team that plays enough of them will have their specific strengths and shortcomings put on display, some more immutable than others. The teams that tend to thrive in the World Cup are the ones most capable of shrinking the distance between the best and worst versions of themselves, such that the arrival of either is not overly surprising or destabilizing. On Monday, Belgium reached through the swagger and confidence that the USMNT had spent four games building, and drew out a fragility that lurked deep within. Unprepared to face the worst version of themselves, the Americans crumbled. It is not often that the complete story of a soccer game can be told by its goals alone, but it is true of this game. Each of the four goals Belgium scored in its 4-1 victory can be held up as a tidy encapsulation of the USMNT's dispiriting performance. The first: a tap-in that was created by Nicholas Raskin being allowed to control a loose ball and dribble through the American box while four USMNT defenders stood by and watched. The second: a header at the back post in which two defenders on the ball failed to stop the cross and two defenders on the post were out-muscled by the goalscorer. The third: a completely fucking humiliating sequence in which Matt Freese got marooned outside his box, kicked the ground instead of the ball, and watched helplessly as the Belgians poked it into an empty net. The fourth: Chris Richards gifting the ball to Romelu Lukaku in his own box and watching the big Belgian stomp his way to a goal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL3kCTgeVKA