2026-06-23 05:06:13
After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causing the traditionally stodgy tournament to post heatedly about the occasion.
Williams retired from competition after a third-round appearance at the 2022 U.S. Open. Her first-round match at Wimbledon will mark her first professional singles match since that day. She won the grass-court major seven times, most recently in 2016. In her last appearance in 2022, she lost in the first round.
When Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool at the end of 2025, I thought we were about to witness an extremely effortful marketing campaign for the telehealth company her husband Alexis Ohanian invests in, and the GLP-1 drugs it prescribes. Since her original retirement, she has appeared regularly in ads for the company, and credited the drugs with losing 34 pounds before her return to competition.
2026-06-23 04:28:50
The San Francisco Giants are a stinking cesspool of bad vibes and bad baseball. That is not the newsy part of this post.
Sure, the Giants' place in the standings (currently 15 games below .500) and the collection of petulant homophobes on the roster have given the public plenty of reason not to prod this smoldering heap of a franchise with a ten-foot pole. But the Giants seem determined to expose every part of their dysfunction, and will not rest until they have created a public nuisance to rival the peeling paint and chemicals of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
On Sunday, with Rafael Devers on first and the Giants trailing the Marlins by a single run in the bottom of the ninth inning, manager Tony Vitello planned on putting in Jonah Cox as a pinch runner. Cox is fast; Devers isn’t. The Giants need to win games. This is simple stuff, really. But even with these indisputable facts to back him up, Vitello clearly is not considered a great authority among the Giants, and Devers especially wasn’t having it. With a mesmerizing finger wag, the form of which was far more elegant than his running form has ever been, Devers signaled that he was not going to get taken out of the game.
2026-06-23 04:08:30
Fresh off reasserting his extraterrestrial talent by opening his sixth World Cup with a hat trick, Lionel Messi proved on Monday that he is in fact still human. Seven minutes into the match between Argentina and Austria, Lautaro Martínez sprinted through on goal only to be taken down by a pair of Austrian defenders. After a VAR review, the play was correctly called a penalty. Messi took the ball, placed it on the spot, and proceeded to do what he has done many times before: miss.
The failed penalty seemed to affect both Messi and the team as a whole. Despite starting the game with the cool confidence typical of this group of world champions, Argentina looked uncharacteristically tentative and anxious after the miss. Austria took advantage, grabbing the match's reins and holding them for the next 20 minutes. Again, the failed conversion and the evident nerviness in the aftermath made for a rare humanizing moment for a man so often described as an alien or even a god. There's a valuable lesson in there: Not even D10S is perfect.
Oh, and the rest of the game? Argentina won, 2-0. Messi scored both goals. He now has five for the tournament, and has officially risen above Miroslav Klose and Marta as the player with the most goals ever scored at the World Cup.
2026-06-23 02:50:46
Alan Greenspan died Monday. The longtime Fed chairman was once hailed as the most powerful man in the world. Greenspan was 100 years old.
Back to me: A couple of cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends of mine wrote a book that came out in the summer of 2009, and other cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends threw them a party. Some of the most powerful people in the city, meaning some of the most powerful people in the world, were invited. They also put me on the guest list. The invite said the party would tip off at 6:30 p.m., but I found no dress code, and I'm thinking the hosts know what they're gonna get couture-wise from McKenna, so as usual I just take whatever's risen to the top of the pile in the walk-on closet in my bedroom and throw it on.
I show up an hour late at a beautiful house in the tony Kalorama neighborhood, and when I walk inside I hear all the noise coming from the backyard, which has an entrance to the side of the front door, and I look out the windows and see everybody looking fancy as hell and face the fact I fucked up, fashion-wise. Plus it's D.C. hot outside, and my car air conditioning had been broken for years, so I’m sweating like Marion Barry and the AC inside the house feels real boss. So instead of immediately going out back, I keep walking past that backyard entrance and toward the kitchen to see if there's anybody lagging in the house who I can bother while I decompress and let my pores close, but I quickly determine that everybody's outside and I better join the party before I'm caught wandering the halls.
2026-06-23 02:23:37
Every international tournament, the widely used and abused "dark horse" designation is bandied about as pundits, fans, and cretins (gamblers) try to be the first to predict a deep run for an unexpected team. The term itself is vague enough to apply to about half the field, depending on one's own criteria. It fits a team that could be a sneaky knockout-stage qualifier from a tough group, it fits a small nation that could even win a knockout match, and it fits a surprise quarterfinalist.
However, the concept is most consistently applied to a team outside of the World Cup elite (made up of the eight countries that have won it, plus the Netherlands) that has a realistic shot at getting to the semifinals. In that way, the dark horses are supposed to be the best of the rest, the best hopes we have of getting something more interesting and novel than just some combination of Argentina, France, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and England in the final four.
The problem is that the World Cup doesn't really work like that. Looking at a list of semifinalists since the first World Cup of the millennium (2002 in South Korea and Japan), you could make the argument that only two true dark horses have made the semis: 2006 Portugal and 2018 Belgium. Those two teams came into the tournament loaded with talent and expectations, and, had things gone slightly differently—if Portugal doesn't give up a penalty to France, or if prime Eden Hazard-Romelu Lukaku-Kevin De Bruyne don't forget how to score against a French defense that shipped three against an underwhelming Argentina—they could have gone on to lift the trophy. (Maybe the trick to be a dark horse World Cup winner is just to avoid France.)
2026-06-23 01:45:45
Things big and small are going bad for Donald Trump. He's losing bad enough on land and at sea in Iran, but worse at a pool back in D.C. One might say the growing algae debacle on the National Mall left him up shit's creek without a paddle, and so he had an Olympic canoer arrested.
Trump painted himself into an American Flag Blue corner with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, so somebody has to pay. Now arrests are being made. It's another sign of how far the republic has fallen that the biggest reaction to throwing folks in jail to distract from presidential fuckups is laughter. But here we are. The Ponzi Scheme of Chaos rolls on.
To recap: Trump had bogusly declared that an urgent situation existed with the Reflecting Pool—or, as he also called the formerly regal body of water on the National Mall, "the Reflecting Pond" and "the Reflecting Lake at the Lincoln Monument"—so he could give no-bid contracts to Republican Party loyalists. Among the folks hired to basically put the pool back in the same shape it was already in was John J. Cafaro, a cartoonish-looking man whose résumé, The New York Times reported, shows convictions for bribery and illegal campaign contributions. Cafaro's pool company is called Greenwater Services, and, sure enough, he's delivered green water to the National Mall.
