2026-04-14 21:09:22
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how Pope Leo XIV, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is "too liberal" and "weak on crime"—for God's sake, there's graffiti all over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!—apparently in tantrum response to Leo XIV having criticized both Trump's war of aggression on Iran and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's framing of that war as having been ordained by God. A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder.
What else. Oh right. Also, toward the end of last week, Trump announced that the United States would begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz, which the nation of Iran has been blockading ever since the U.S. attacked that country illegally and without provocation at the end of February. For those catching up, Trump has spent the past several weeks desperately attempting to browbeat the rest of the world into opening the Strait by force on his behalf, while also continually insisting on his social-media website that the Strait is of no consequence and also that the U.S. military could open it at any time. Keen students of history may recall way back in double-aught-one week ago, when Trump threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Iran if it did not open the Strait within a few hours. A lesser tactician might observe that responding to a blockade of the Strait by blockading the Strait is the equivalent of punishing a guy for punching you in the face by also punching yourself in the face. What this analysis fails to apprehend is that, in war, you cannot be defeated if, whenever anything happens in the war, you say that it was no big deal and also everybody else's fault and also good actually and due to your genius.
OK back to the AI image of Trump as Jesus Christ. As one might imagine, Trump's choice to propagate this image has not gone down super well with whole huge swaths of the populace, including many of the types of people who, while politically conservative and otherwise sympathetic to many of Trump's hatreds and resentments and perhaps before now proud to have voted for him, are sensitive to what my colleague David Roth called "red-letter Antichrist Shit," and so get a little itchy when an elected world leader A) starts an elective war in the Middle East, and B) portrays himself as the Messiah. In fact, many of those people spent much of the past 36 hours calling him the Antichrist, right there on his own website. Trump deleted the image at some point around midday on Monday.
2026-04-14 04:07:38
Sea, trees, and hills make Monte Carlo the prettiest stop on the tennis tour, but for Sunday's championship, it did its best to dull itself. The singles final featured gray sky, chilly air, and gusts tossing the ball around unpredictably. It was sure to be a rough outing at the Monte-Carlo Country Club, no matter the faces on court or the stakes of the match. The two era-defining players in men's tennis, scrapping for the world's top ranking, could not overcome the weather and redeem the day. Even with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner out there—or precisely because each was playing against the other—there were wild wind-borne errors and moments of uncharacteristic anti-clutch. Not every installment in a classic rivalry is itself a classic, but Sinner's 7-6(5), 6-3 victory, which snagged his first big clay-court title and let him regain the No. 1 ranking, still left me with plenty to chew on.
One of the most surprising aspects of this matchup is that it took until April 12 for it to happen. Throughout 2025, Sinner and Alcaraz effectively had a standing date in the final of every big event. Because no other player seemed good enough yet to interfere, this pattern was expected to continue in 2026. At the start of this season, they narrowly missed one another in the Australian Open final, thanks to a blazing performance from late-stage Novak Djokovic. Then came another miss in the Indian Wells final, as occasional interloper Daniil Medvedev got out of his funk to beat Alcaraz. (Firmly back in his funk, Medvedev lost his first match in Monte Carlo 6-0, 6-0, and smashed his racket seven times.)
Upsets for Sinner in Doha and Alcaraz in Miami prevented a clash between the top two seeds in those locales, too. All told, it had been about four months since they last met in the championship match of the ATP Finals. After such a lengthy tolerance break, I expected to have my mind lit up by an encounter on clay, the surface that most emphasizes their physicality and point construction, best seen in their generational duel at the French Open last year. That was not the match we got at Monte Carlo. The conditions were just too disruptive, and the players could never settle into enough of rhythm, instead providing a twitchy battle that still had plenty of tension to it, if not rallies constructed like epic poems.
2026-04-14 01:20:34
I like to think that I am both a professional at what I do and a sports fan still not too jaded to have lost my irrational passions. I'm lucky enough to work at Defector, where I am free to exercise both those sides of myself, which is why I can openly throw my bias in everyone's face by saying this, even if I can't believe it as I type it: I am absolutely rooting for Manchester City to come from behind and steal the Premier League title from Arsenal.
Trust me, as a renowned and beloved Liverpool fan, this hurts me more to write than it does you to read. My Pool Boys battled with City for years on either side of the COVID pandemic, and came second in all but one year of direct confrontation (the awkwardly interrupted 2019-20 season). Twice Liverpool finished an agonizing single point behind City in a title race, and that's a fate I never thought I'd wish on another club. Until now, that is. Due to the events of this past weekend, not only am I rooting for Pep Guardiola and his band of state-bought mercenaries, but I am doing so with few reservations, thanks both to the return of the best kind of Pepball and to the continued existence of Mikel Arteta's torturous brand of soccer.
Let's start with Arsenal, because I feel pretty confident in saying that Saturday's 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth was the worst Gunners performance of the season.
2026-04-14 00:53:06
The Milwaukee Bucks fired Doc Rivers on Monday. What a terrible time they have all had. The Bucks failed to advance out of the first round of the playoffs in two previous tries under Rivers; this season, beset by injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo and showing that characteristic idealessness of a Rivers-coached team, they played to a miserable 32-win record, missed the play-in, wound up in a public fight with their best player, and entered recrimination season well before the close of their official one.
Rivers took the job in January 2024, in what looked at the time like a midseason coup d'état: The Bucks had hired Rivers to be an advisor to rookie head coach Adrian Griffin, but Griffin was fired after 43 games, despite coaching the Bucks to a record of 30–13. I cannot confidently accuse Rivers of having played the scheming vizier, but his time as head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers had ended months earlier with grinding frustration and apocalyptic vibes, and a side door might've been his only realistic route back into the big chair with a real-deal contender. In any case, as the prize for a few months of no official duties under general manager Jon Horst and Milwaukee's owners, Rivers found himself coaching in the All-Star Game and helming a would-be championship contender.
It didn't work: Rivers coached that team to a 17–19 finish and an early playoff exit. The Bucks may have made a mistake in hiring an aging coach who was previously spending his time playing golf and mailing in appearances on Bill Simmons's podcast, but they stuck with their guy. The Bucks won 48 games and avoided the play-in last season, but Damian Lillard came down with deep vein thrombosis in late March, sat out the remainder of the regular season, played like shit for two games of a first-round playoff series, and then suffered a devastating Achilles injury that wiped out his 2025–26 season. In a move that will be rued for a generation by suffering Bucks fans, the team decided to use the NBA's stretch provision to waive Lillard, adding more than $22 million in dead salary to their annual payroll until the summer of 2030. Rivers and Horst flew to Greece ahead of this season in order to convince a skeptical Antetokounmpo that this was good business, that the team could compete by using savings from the maneuver to sign Myles Turner. That also has not worked.
2026-04-14 00:30:40
Despite threats—by an editor who shall go unnamed, but who does not have my best interests in mind—to ship me off to Aintree Racecourse to cover the event in person, I am once again conducting an ethnography of English horse race attendees from the safe remove of Getty Images. By year three, one begins to pick up patterns, such as the fact that the atmosphere at the Grand National is not only perpetually soused but also, as is true for much of England, perpetually damp. This year's edition emphasizes the latter point, focusing on attempts to use and/or manufacture an umbrella to stay warm and dry. You will be pleased to hear that dampness is not enough to deter attendees from sitting upon the pavement.
2026-04-14 00:06:04
Before Sunday, Wout van Aert's professional cycling career looked most like a testament to the irresistible force of entropy.
Before Sunday, the Belgian had never won either of the two biggest one-day races on the calendar, suffering untimely crashes and mechanicals, always seeming to get injured at the wrong time, and occasionally being a victim of his own strength, the sort of rider nobody would work with. Before Sunday, van Aert's glaring inability to win Paris-Roubaix—the race that means the most both to him personally and to Belgian fans collectively—despite finishing in the top 10 all the time, and looking like one of the most talented and natural bike riders of his generation, had begun to feel like it would be the first line when the story of his career was written. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert as a tragic figure, haunted by the twinned misfortune of regular-old bad luck on the bike and the bad timing of happening to race at the same time as Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogacar. Before Sunday, you could get away with saying "Wouth Place," to denote a specifically van Aertian genre of bungled win. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert—world cyclocross champion, one-time Monument winner, author of defining Tour de France performances—and see a rider who could have been more, a 31-year-old who wasted the best chances he would ever get to take a career-defining win. Before Sunday, you could read van Aert's 10 top-10s and zero wins at the two cobbled Monuments as a reminder of cycling's cruelty and painfulness, that losing is the background radiation of the sport and that winning offers but a temporary escape.
After Sunday, nobody will ever look at Wout van Aert that way again.
