2025-08-01 00:31:05
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when transactions became more important than games, but it is indisputably true that fans love the movement of players and money from locale to locale for the same reason we love gambling—because it is busy, and because it is another chance to display our ignorance.
Until baseball's trade deadline brings July's annual Month of Bargains to a close later today, we can all imagine what our favorite team is going to do in lieu of delivering any actual work product; this will keep us both frothily engaged and emotionally and fiscally tied to the teams that otherwise drag us down. We love when our team is buying and hate when they are selling, because one implies belief and the other despair. Buying rocks, selling sucks.
2025-08-01 00:09:26
Brandy: This was my first read of The Art of Fielding, though I do have memories of it being like, A Book You Should Read back in the day. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting but I found it quite winsome! It has an undeniable charm and there is a certain quaintness to it that I enjoyed a lot. Less baseball than I thought there would be, maybe. Am I the only one who was reading it for the first time?
Maitreyi: I also read it for the first time! And I knew only very superficial things about it before—that it had to do with baseball, that it had been at the center of a major bidding war, and that it earned the author a big advance. It was a bit more folksy and commercial (in a good way!) than I expected. But it ended up being a book I was surprised I hadn’t read before, even if my feelings were a little mixed. Midwest campus baseball novel is very much my speed.
2025-07-31 23:20:16
On May 11, 2023, Ellerie Ulfers was pitching for Washburn High School against district rival Southwest in a varsity softball game in Minneapolis, Minn. The start time had been moved back 15 minutes, to 3:45 p.m., to accommodate an umpire’s schedule. But Ulfers shook it off; she was used to pitching under pressure and in less-than-ideal conditions—she’d been on the varsity team since the year before, as an eighth grader. (In Minneapolis, since most middle school sports were cut due to budget shortfalls in 2015, middle schoolers play on high school teams.) The game was tense, with the lead going back and forth, and by the end of the sixth inning, the score was tight: Southwest 15–Washburn 13.
But instead of getting another chance to bat and close out the game, Ulfers and all the other athletes were told to go home.
2025-07-31 22:41:06
And not just from whipping your head around to track another one of his throws sailing past the first baseman. I'll be here all day. Try the veal.
Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe has a problem. No one involved wants to use the dreaded Y-word. Yips are for Chihuahuas! It's a "defensive slump," according to his manager Aaron Boone. To Volpe, it's simply "this," as in, "I’ve never really experienced something like this." What this is is a newfound and inexplicable inability to throw a baseball where he wants it to go. Volpe has committed three errors in his last two games to push his season total to 16, the most of anyone in MLB.
2025-07-31 21:47:21
People are starving in Gaza. They are starving because the Israeli government is not allowing enough food to enter, and because what food becomes sporadically available can be claimed only by those willing to enter the death traps engineered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American and Israeli-backed private food distribution system.
A recent report from the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, including data up to July 25, “indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.” Because this crisis is so widespread, it will necessarily impact wide swathes of the population. There will be Palestinian men, women, and children who struggle to meet their minimal requirements for nutrition. This will happen to elderly diabetics and pregnant women and asthmatic teenagers. The frail bodies of children with conditions that impede muscle development will become frailer. That hunger will come for those already struggling to thrive makes the situation more horrifying, not less, provided you are a person who has not systematically shriveled your own moral instincts down to nothing.
2025-07-31 21:04:27
Perhaps you think that a rematch between two teams who played what might be the most thrilling WNBA Finals in league history should have arrived before the penultimate day of July. Sometimes it's best for these things to simmer, though, and in this case the time away served everyone well. The 2025 WNBA season has had months to settle into itself, to surface compelling narratives and interesting players, and here at the start of the stretch run, there is one story that matters more than all the others: There are two great teams in this league, and then there's everyone else.
Before Wednesday night, the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx hadn't seen each other since Game 5 of the 2024 Finals, which brought an entertaining and hard-fought series to a sloppy and somewhat disappointing end. They have since maintained their perches atop the league—the Liberty entered last night's game in Minneapolis with a 17-8 record and a net rating of 8.2, second-best in the league. The Lynx carried with them a 22-5 record and a sparkling 13.2 net rating. The anticipation for this rematch was somewhat diminished by the absence of Breanna Stewart, who is out of the Liberty's lineup while dealing with a bone bruise in her knee. But these teams are good enough and deep enough to turn any meeting between them into a spectacle, and that's exactly what they did throughout Minnesota's 100–93 victory.
