The prefight of the year already has been fought. Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. both made weight Friday in London for their Saturday night rematch at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. As the size of the venue hints, this is a massively anticipated event in England. The actual fight will have a hard time competing with its backstory. Backstories, rather. This thing’s got storylines for the ages. Among them: A rematch for the middleweight belt! Will Eubank's détente with his dad (and former trainer) hold through the final bell? These fighters just plain don’t like each other, but their fathers don’t like each other even more**** after their own set of legendary bouts in the 1990s! There's even an angle involving Neymar.

A game recap of Wednesday's 131-95 victory, published on Celtics.com and NBA.com, praised Boston's leading scorers Payton Pritchard and Derrick White, in that order. That led to an unfortunate headline, which Memphis Grizzlies beat writer Sharon Shy Brown captured in a timely screenshot on Thursday:

Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender, who made little outward intellectual contribution to the world, had all these highly valuable forms of expertise. Many powerful people have claimed that Epstein was some sort of charismatic polymath. Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz once said that Epstein had a "probing, inquiring mind." He also relayed that Larry Summers—the economist who over his career ran the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, and Harvard—admired Epstein's economic thinking. A spokesman for former President Bill Clinton said in 2002 that the former president admired Epstein's "keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science." Of his former employee Epstein, then-Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne said in that same article, "He is a very smart guy."

Hello and happy Friday! We're getting ready to wind things down for the week, so spend some time asking us questions in the comments section. See ya down there. **Update (3:02 p.m. ET):** OK, we're gonna wrap up here. Enjoy the weekend.

"The New York Jets" is hardly the phrase you begin a story with if you want to inspire a reader to embrace the day with any sense of purpose, let alone joy, so you might be fooled into considering this an apology for cowboy-sneezing on your Friday. But if you've read as far as "Friday," then seeing "The New York Jets" was insufficient deterrent. At that point, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. So, to the New York Jets: Thursday was a big day for them. They learned first that the boss is angry enough at his employees' opinions of their workplace that he is challenging their right to say anything about it at all. Later in the day, they lost comfortably to a team wearing the sort of all-gray uniform that belongs in a 1935 preseason game between Mudville and Boghouse Flats. The good news is that they, and therefore we, can take the weekend off.

There’s no wrong way to make a chocolate chip cookie. Let’s get that part out of the way so that we don’t get into a whole big fight about whose cuisine reigns supreme. You put a chocolate chip cookie in front of me, I’ll eat it and be happy. That’s a lock. That said, I have been monkeying around with chocolate chip cookie recipes for as long as I’ve been a homemaker (nearly 20 years!). Many years ago, I stumbled upon a copycat recipe for Chick-fil-A’s chocolate chunk cookies that received a glowing reception from all of the cookie monsters in my house. CFA makes a truly bitchin’ chocolate chipper, so knocking off their recipe is as satisfying for my belly as it is for my sense of justice.

**RICHMOND, Va. —** The audience was booing Ira Glass. It was the opening session of Resonate, a podcast festival founded three years ago by Chioke I’Anson at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Audio documentarian Eleanor McDowall played a clip of the social media show _Subway Takes_, where Glass argues that “every podcast is better at 2.0 speed” because “your brain can take it in, you totally can get the information, and you can listen to more podcasts.” I’Anson grabbed the mic back after McDowall’s presentation and quipped: “Our lord and savior losing his damn mind.”

_Welcome to theDefector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about._ **Israel:** This week certainly made it clear that the playoff committee is mostly operating off of vibes instead of any concrete, verifiable assessment of who the best teams are. But it doesn’t really matter that much, because no one can tell you which of these teams are actually good anyway. As soon as you think you have a handle on the landscape, a ranked team will just go and do something stupid like almost blowing it against Iowa or actually blowing it against Wake Forest. Why should anyone be expected to go off anything other than vibes?

The relationship between uncle and nephew is riven with questions of the human psyche. What does the nephew see when he looks at the uncle? The brother he never had, or another father to struggle against? What lessons must the uncle pass down to the nephew, and must he destroy himself in the process? From the moment a nephew is ripped into this world, he is placed into conflict with the uncle. Their ultimate confrontation must be soaked in blood, or, at the very least, egg yolks. The ancient and cosmic battle between uncle and nephew once again manifested itself in Madrid on Thursday. That is where disgraced former Spanish Football Federation president Luis Rubiales, whose career blew up after he acted like a gross pig and kissed Spanish national team player Jenni Hermoso at the 2023 World Cup, was attacked by his uncle, who is also named Luis Rubiales. While Nephew Rubiales was attempting to give a talk about his new book, Uncle Rubiales made his way through the crowd and fired three eggs at his brother's son.

Nikola Jokic had another one of those _what the hell is happening right now_ performances Wednesday night, against the unbelievably depressing Los Angeles Clippers, posting 55 points on 23 shots, plus 12 rebounds and six assists. Because there is never just one way to gawk at Jokic's heroics, it is notable that this was only the fifth time in 11 games so far this season that Jokic has _not_ posted a triple-double. The Clippers game-planned to limit his playmaking opportunities, opting for one-on-one defense with huge lummoxes Ivica Zubac and Brook Lopez, and largely staying home on shooters. Jokic accepted the invitation and immediately mashed his counterparts to a slimy goo. He scored 25 points on 11 shots in the first quarter, and then scored 19 on perfect shooting in the third quarter, to push the Nuggets out to a commanding lead. It was only because the Clippers pretended to maintain any late competitive fire that Jokic was forced to participate for any portion of the fourth quarter, tipping home a rebound and burying a free throw before retiring for the final four minutes. When it was Zubac, Jokic pushed him around down in the paint; when it was Lopez, Jokic bombed from the perimeter. Against both men he forced contact, dragged them into swirling actions at the elbow, and even outraced them in the open floor. It's all stuff you've seen Jokic do one million times, but it's still very fun sometimes to watch Jokic skip the elaborate table-setting and get straight down to the meal. _Defend me straight up, will you? We'll just see about that!_ The demoralization of Zubac started very early, with some bruising backdowns and a couple of those arcing, fluttering shotput hooks, and then a big smooth dunk in transition. The Clippers still weren't double-teaming in the third, but all eyes were certainly on Jokic, and he was finally able to pass his teammates into some wide-open looks. It was a somewhat inverted masterpiece of a performance; Jokic was so dominant that his coach David Adelman had to sort of sheepishly swear that he meant no harm by simply inserting his best player into the game during the game's closing stages.

Stefan Fatsis went 17 years between books, but you wouldn't say that he was taking it easy. He was on NPR and co-hosted Slate's _Hang Up and Listen_ podcast for many years, and was writing big feature stories on a fairly regular cadence, but there was no new book until _Unabridged_ , his excellent new history of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, American lexicography, and his experience while embedded with the dictionary's staff of lexicographers, came out last month. That it took nearly a month to get him on the podcast is a reflection of how busily he has been out there spreading the good word since that publication date. But we got him:

_Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? _ _Email the Roo_ _. You can also read Drew over at_ _SFGATE_ _, and_ _buy Drew’s books_ _while_ _you’re at it_ _._ By now you know that the only thing that _The New York Times_ does well in 2025 is games. Using both Wordle—which the company bought from indie game designer Josh Wardle in 2022—and their popular daily crossword puzzle as twin anchors, the _Times_ has built a Games app that has boosted the company’s revenues to record levels. The _Times_ ’ process for developing games is as thoughtful and deliberate as its reporting is not. So when the NYT Games team launches a new puzzle, I can usually count on it to be a worthy addition to their portfolio.

After a brief foray into creatures big, flashy, and famous, we must return to form and focus on the spineless, creepy, and crawling. Today we're shining a spotlight on one of the most loathèd creepy-crawlers of all—the humble spider. You may fear them, what with their eight spindly legs and general can-do demeanor, but what if you found a little space in your heart, an open drawer or empty shelf, in which a small spider might find a home? Would not this small act of empathy expand the wonder and awe you felt the world offered you? Would not this simple act of grace make you feel a deeper connection to all creatures great and small? If not, too bad! I've got two new spider web discoveries to share with you. We're talking spiders this month, and you're just going to have to deal. It is true that different spiders and their eclectic webs made it into the hallowed pages of Defector just last month, but such a coincidence does not detract in any way from the immediacy of these latest web-based discoveries. After all, what is a web for but to connect us all?

Once every week or two, I swim molasses-slow laps at the YMCA. I’ve been on something of a fitness journey this year, testing out different forms of exercise to see what sticks—what feels the least torturous and humiliating as a fat person. Swimming appeals more than most activities I’ve tried. I like the quiet of being submerged in the water, where no one can talk to me as I try to remember to breathe. I change as quickly as possible in the family locker room beforehand, because I’m not wanted in the women’s locker room. I learned this by experiencing several hostile interactions there with fellow members. Some of the cisgender women see me as a man invading their territory. They’ve told me so, and I’ve overheard them telling one another. “He said he’s a she,” one once loudly reported to her friend about me. (Wrong twice! I’m a they.) The Y staff has told me to both ignore the instigators and report their names, as if my harassers have stopped to properly introduce themselves.

It is that time of year when college basketball programs fatten themselves up on inferior competition, which makes for a lot of games that can be safely ignored. But wait, before you skim over the box score from Notre Dame's 85–58 victory over Akron on Wednesday night, take a look at what Hannah Hidalgo did. Are you ready to receive information that could potentially cause psychic damage? Hidalgo finished the game with 44 points, nine rebounds, and _16 steals._ Sixteen steals! Against Division-I college basketball players! In just 28 minutes of floor time!

“I know you want there to be a master plan,” the kidnapping victim says to her captor. In _Bugonia_ , the latest movie by Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone plays girlboss biotech CEO Michelle Fuller, and Jesse Plemons is Teddy Gatz, who works at a fulfillment center for Michelle’s Auxolith corporation, in a town hollowed out by the opioid crisis and other disasters. Teddy, a beekeeper, is especially conscious of colony collapse disorder, which is possibly linked to neonicotinoids released into the environment by Auxolith, and which he connects to larger systemic issues as well as his own more intimate trials, his mother having slipped into a coma while enrolled in a trial for Auxolith’s experimental opioid-withdrawl drug. And so he has yanked Michelle from her home, chained her up in his basement, and subjected her to enhanced interrogation, convinced that there _is_ a master plan. No, not the asphyxiation of the New Deal welfare state by triangulating laissez-faire liberals, Silicon Valley disruptors, and bootstrappy ghouls in thrall to the profit motive—he thinks that she is a member of an alien race from the Andromeda galaxy, sent to Earth to dominate and destroy us. The median American voter has a remarkable ability to diagnose a social malaise while misapprehending its causes in monumentally scattershot ways. _Bugonia_ , as explicitly as the quoted “master plan” dialogue indicates, allegorizes a particularly American paranoia. Things as they are are so sinister that publicly available explanations for them are inadequate, Teddy believes, and if these secret, sinister causes were just revealed, people would finally awaken in outrage to things as they are.

Democrats in the House Oversight Committee released on Wednesday a new batch of emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex criminal who was notoriously in contact with all sorts of powerful people. By now it is well known that Donald Trump was connected to Epstein in many ways, but these new emails indicate more explicitly that Trump had some awareness of Epstein's sex trafficking. The correspondences are dated between 2011 and 2019, the year of Epstein's death in jail, and his correspondents spanned industries and nominal political affiliations. They included Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House Counsel to President Barack Obama; Larry Summers, economist and former Harvard president; Michael Wolff, columnist and journalist; Peggy Siegal, entertainment publicist; and Ghislaine Maxwell, close associate and fellow sex offender. Epstein sent his emails from accounts that riffed on his initials, like "jeeitunes@gmail.com" or "jeevacation@gmail.com," and he punctuated them like E. E. Cummings. In the messages, Epstein talked about business and life, spoke dismissively about Trump's capacities and legal affairs, offered PR and journalism advice, and made one remark that can be read as an open reference to his own pedophilia.

Regardless of whether they authored the most disastrous trade of the century, or considered Jrue Holiday and Nikola Jokic to be equal talents, a general manager getting fired 11 games into the season is pretty shocking. Sure, some coaches get the ax extremely early in the season, though the causes and intended effects of those decisions are confined to the realm of what is happening on the basketball court. This does not happen to GMs, especially not GMs who were lucky enough to earn the first overall pick in a draft with an extraordinarily exciting consensus top pick. Former Cleveland Cavaliers GM Chris Grant was fired months after drafting Anthony Bennett; Nico Harrison's firing from the Dallas Mavericks, by contrast, has nothing to do with who he used the first overall pick on. Let us consider the sideways start to Cooper Flagg's NBA career. The story of Flagg's first 11 professional games is that of a rookie performing at a very high level, despite an unfamiliar role and a somewhat disastrous team situation. Flagg's fit on the Mavericks was a strange one from the jump. The team Harrison built is tall, clunky, and generally incapable of dribbling the basketball, leaving head coach Jason Kidd with a critical shortage of healthy, capable guards. His solution has been to start Flagg at point guard, a position he has never played before. While surely good for his long-term development (this worked for Giannis Antetokounmpo when Kidd did it in Milwaukee), Flagg is clearly still getting used to his present-tense role as a lead ballhandler.

The San Jose Sharks have been beneath your notice for years. As this formerly stalwart franchise has missed the playoffs in six straight seasons, they've existed as a total non-competitive nothing that makes every aspect of the game as easy as possible for their opponents. While playoff-starved clubs like Buffalo and Detroit at least gave their fans some exciting streaks, and moments where the postseason felt within their reach, San Jose just loses, all the time, and not in fun ways. They haven't been able to score. They haven't had a good goalie. They put up a minus-105 goal differential last year, which was a whole _35 goals_ worse than the next team in Chicago. The Sharks of the last few years served no use beyond feeding talented guys in their prime to other teams, or volunteering as a dumping ground for contracts. It all sucked. However, there is a long-term path to improvement in the NHL even during such a hopeless cycle of failure. That path is "Lose games, get lucky in the draft lottery, score some of the best young players entering the league." The Sharks have done quite a good job following this strategy, and as such they've assembled an extremely promising collection of young players who are starting to turn this team into, if nothing else, something redeemably watchable on a good night.

Harry and I did not know that Nico Harrison was about to be fired when we invited famed blogger Ock Sportello back on _Nothing But Respect_ this week, but the timing worked out perfectly, as our planned Brooklyn Nets vivisection (yes that is a threat) dovetailed with the Nico stuff and the necessary Sacramento Kings monologue. The loose theme was "bad stuff," notably the Patrick Dumont/Nicholas Dickason photo-op (pictured above); the in-arena vibe in Sacramento; and the experience of watching Cam Thomas, who lowkey moves like this guy. As for Ock Sportello: I highly recommend his Substack, _Never Hungover_ , the site of many bangers such as a necessary diatribe against the sports quote graphic industrial complex, his incredibly popular diagnosis of the swag crisis, and the blog post that put him on my radar, his essential portrait of Ball Don't Stop, a load-bearing character in the broader _NBR_ universe. Ock was a frequent guest in _NBR_ Season 1, and I imagine we'll have him back on a few more times this season.

Some NBA games are starting at 11:00 p.m. ET. This is a new development coinciding with the league striking a new broadcast deal with NBC, which aired Tuesday night's Nuggets–Kings game on the Peacock streaming app. I'm an adaptable person who generally accepts change cheerfully, but trying to watch last night's game made me feel like several media executives were spitting directly into my face. I know NBA games never start at the advertised time, but it was still annoying to turn on the broadcast a few minutes before 11:00 p.m. and see a big "Countdown To Tipoff" graphic on the screen with 20 minutes on it. _That's fine. I can read a book for a little bit._

We’re back, baby! And we’re kicking off our ninth season of _Normal Gossip_ by gabbing it up with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai! In this episode, Rachelle and Malala dig into such questions as whether it’s a good idea to let your college roommate plan a “dirt-cheap” trip to Europe for you, whether hitchhiking is an important life experience, and whether comparing hand sizes _always_ means you want to bone.

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have drill-less art hanging, an extremely deep closet, and a room with too many jobs. Mario asks:

America may have invented match fixing back in the first decades of the 20th century, and we may be bringing it back in this one with new gambling scandals in basketball and baseball, but at some level it is hard to escape the sense that we’re resting on our laurels. People wreck their careers messing around on their phones, sure, and relief pitchers spike random pitches and risk both their careers and their sport’s integrity, marginal wing players wreck their lives by being weird—none of it is ideal, but it is also all very low effort. The FBI might be smug about what it claims to have found in the NBA and MLB, but consider what our Turkish brethren are doing with their entire soccer industry. The mere numbers, which in this case have nothing to do with wagers, are staggering. The Athletic's Colin Millar reported on Tuesday that the Turkish Football Association has suspended 1,024 players accused of match fixing. This came weeks after Ali Rampling, also of The Athletic, wrote this story for the same publication about 149 match officials being suspended for the same offenses. There is a political context to all of this—in an unrelated trial, prosecutors sought 2,352 years of jail time on corruption charges against the mayor of Istanbul, who happens to be the foremost political rival of Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Your personal dosage re: grains of salt is your business, and corruption allegations are all the rage when political opponents need dealing with, but the scale of this particular scandal speaks for itself.

In the winter of 1977, _Sports Illustrated_ reporter Ray Kennedy ventured into the Riverside Table Tennis club at 96th and Broadway. It was a dingy joint with leaky pipes, below street level, beneath a supermarket, inhabited by characters with names like Freddie the Fence, Betty the Monkey Lady, and Tony the Arm, a smattering of celebrities—Walter Matthau! Art Carney! Bobby Fischer! Kurt Vonnegut!—and a group of violinists from the Metropolitan Opera. The club’s main draw was the magniloquent Marty Reisman, its owner-operator, with a heavy emphasis on "operator." Marty was then 47 years old, past his prime as a competitive athlete, which had been back when the United States was a ping-pong powerhouse and New York City was the hub of the sport in this country. But "The Needle," so-called for his cadaverous frame as much as his sharpness, was back in the spotlight, because table tennis was enjoying a minute in the aftermath of the Ping-Pong Diplomacy affair with China.