Defector

For the first time in over 20 years, Novak Djokovic lost his first-round match at a Slam. On Sunday he fell in five sets to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, a 25-year-old clay-court specialist appearing in just his third-ever U.S. Open main draw. In other words, the sort of opponent Djokovic has made a career of dispatching, even if it did sometimes take him a leisurely five sets to do it.

Two matches into a new Premier League season is the perfect time to overreact. One match is a fluke; three matches feel too real. Two matches, however, give an overeager observer just enough pattern recognition to make claims that far exceed reality. This is doubly true if a club has shown quality and frailty in almost equal part.

Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Houston Texans. Your 2025 record: The Texans won 12 games last year. Their defense stomped around like King Ghidorah ravaging Tokyo. Their offense puttered along like a dump truck with two flat tires and one square one.

We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Oregon. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love and Chan running an alleged scam operation that involved defrauding various women through Love (unconvincingly) pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers.

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified but Twitter was almost certainly where.

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair. Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being.

Like all people not gravely deficient of soul, I teared up a little when I heard Dolly Parton died. I am by nature something of a patch of soft pavement—easily impressed upon —and so there’s not much surprising here. What was odd came a bit later when, attending to the funerary rites proper to these exhaustingly online days, I scrolled through one performance after another. There was an inner tumult, an upwelling excess.

Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here.

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball.