I took over the Paris Review softball team this year because the former captain, Lauren Kane, left the magazine for a big job at The New York Review of Books just before I was hired, and someone noted during my first week that I might be a good replacement because I “like sports” (i.e., I sometimes watch Premier League soccer on weekend mornings). I am not, strictly speaking, an athlete, and had never played a full game of softball; still, wanting to be amenable, I agreed and found myself on the phone intermittently all spring with the New York City Parks Department, trying to get our field permits nailed down. At one point I was arguing with someone about the timing of sunset on a specific day in July.

The list of things I didn’t know about softball when the season began in May is long and comical. Among them: Not every field has bases—if you don’t bring them, you might need to use your shoes as second and third. Turf can be very slippery and you should expect bloody knees and have a first aid kit on hand. The play is often at second, and even more often at first. Pitching badly is sometimes actually preferable to pitching well. You can run through first base but not the other ones. You have to shift over in the field when a lefty is batting. You should not attempt to catch with your bare hands, even if it seems like the ball is coming at you very slowly. Right field is actually kind of a chill place to be, except when it isn’t. It all comes down to the quality of your ringers—and sending people shamelessly pleading emails to get them to show up to your games.

When I arrived to play our first game, against Vanity Fair, I didn’t even know how many outfielders a team required. It was a bleak beginning of the season, pre–Memorial Day; there were only seven of us, most of whom had never played and the rest of whom hadn’t practiced. I had expected  a few people hitting around jovially in the summer twilight, and instead we arrived to face a team of guys who were saying things like, “My favorite spring ritual is dusting off my cleats!” One of them got really mad at me over the way I was standing at first base. (I was standing wrong.) We lost 27–1. I was surprisingly demoralized by the experience and wasn’t relishing the concept of forking my summer evenings over to what seemed like the perfectly miserable pastime of taking the subway up to Central Park to get crushed. All in all it seemed like it was going to end up being a raw deal, being softball captain—the kind of thing I would try to foist on someone else next summer. In our second game, we lost 11–3 to The Drift.

Deadline day is over! Aubameyang returned, Nottingham Forest dug up some grubs, and Louis van Gaal got involved for some reason. And don’t mind Gary, he’ll stop bothering you soon.

Marcus, Luke, Andy and Jim discuss all that, while Brendan Rodgers got the claws out last night. Plus, there’s the small matter of Arsenal’s visit to Old Trafford and a Merseyside derby! Hold on to your sons.

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After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state officials in February to launch child abuse investigations targeting parents who helped their transgender kids get gender-affirming health care, a 14-year-old trans girl became so anxious about the prospect of losing access to her medications that she was pulled out of school and hospitalized for days. Some doctors and pharmacies around the state stopped offering teenagers life-saving puberty blockers and hormone treatments. A mental health provider in Austin abruptly withdrew care from a suicidal trans boy, leaving his parents to sleep on his bedroom floor night after night to ensure he didn’t kill himself. Many families fled the state.

Those are just some of the stories in a legal brief submitted to a state court last week on behalf of two LGBTQ-focused nonprofits and 13 Texas families with transgender kids. The families are begging the court to make permanent a prior temporary injunction prohibiting state officials from investigating parents under Abbott’s order. Although Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services hasn’t yet ripped any trans children in Texas from their homes and sent them to foster care, the families argue its investigations have already had tragic consequences.

Since Abbott’s directive took effect, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), one of the nonprofits cited in the brief, has received at least 60 reports from families struggling to obtain health care for trans children. Some doctors reportedly denied prescriptions for kids at the onset of puberty, hoping that it might be legally safer to offer them treatment at a later point. The nonprofit is working with 27 families in two metro areas who could not obtain puberty blockers, reversible prescriptions that give trans kids a chance to explore their gender identity as they grow older while temporarily delaying the puberty changes in their body that could make their gender dysphoria worse. Equality Texas, the other nonprofit in the brief, says kids have been turned away by doctors or denied prescriptions at pharmacies in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and the city of Garland.

Families say they’re also afraid to get their trans children other types of health care, worried that the kids’ gender identity and medical history might become known to the hospital and be shared with state authorities. According to the brief, when one trans kid went to a hospital for emergency psychiatric treatment, hospital staffers reported the mother to state officials, who accused her of child abuse. In another case, a trans child almost slept in a hallway at a mental health facility because the facility, citing legal risks, didn’t want to admit the kid to a ward. TENT intervened.

“As a result of losing healthcare,” the families in the brief saw their kids experience “a variety of debilitating symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm.” The 14-year-old girl I mentioned, identified as A.P., was so “paralyzed with anxiety” that she was pulled out of eighth grade and had to finish the academic year at home. A nonbinary teen identified as C was devastated when their school cited the governor’s order as a reason to rescind approval of a learning unit about nonbinary gender identities, which the teen had hoped would help bullies at school become more understanding. A 9-year-old started crying when their parents told them to no longer talk publicly about being trans. “The child has since expressed fear of being…put up for adoption, sharing the heartbreaking worry that ‘nobody would adopt me because I am trans,'” the brief says.

New books by women interrogate female desire in different ways

DAY ONE

I sit at the long blond pine table I use for a desk. Nothing happens. Maybe I can make something happen.

A few years ago there was a popular self-help book called How To Make Sh*t Happen, never mind that peristalsis is involuntary. I eat some mango slices and a green apple and a banana. I drink twelve ounces of whole milk with a scoop of whey protein. I find a leftover fried artichoke in the fridge, wrapped in aluminum foil.

I listen to Michael Gielen conducting Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, but it’s not loud enough.

Birdman director Alejandro G Iñárritu comes unstuck at the Venice Film Festival

Donald Trump’s plan to exact revenge on Big Tech—and make billions by launching his own social media empire and taking it public—was always going to be a long shot. And while it’s not yet dead, the obstacles are mounting.

For starters, Trump Media & Technology Group is reportedly not making payments to vendors. Last week, Fox Business reported that RightForge, an internet hosting company that markets itself as friendly to conservative customers who can’t find hosting elsewhere, has not been paid since March. That’s no small matter; RightForge is reportedly providing much of the technical underpinning of the TruthSocial platform—and the company is apparently owed as much as $1.6 million. A representative for TMTG did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones, but it would not be altogether surprising if TruthSocial is facing a cash crunch. Making money running a social media business is, at best, a dicey proposition. Twitter, which has more than 230 million users, managed to lose $270 million last quarter. TruthSocial has perhaps 2 million active users (Trump himself has 3.9 million total followers).

But the plan was never to have TruthSocial pull itself up by its bootstraps, making its way on whatever revenue it could scrape together. From the beginning—the nascent media business was announced last September—Trump’s goal has been to take the whole operation to the stock market, where (theoretically) huge sums of money can be raised from investors. But Trump’s toxic post-January 6 reputation has made that more difficult; in the wake of the insurrection, a number of financial institutions cut ties with him, closing his bank accounts and swearing off any more lending. With no big banks to back an IPO, Trump turned to something called a SPAC—a special purpose acquisition company, or a blank-check company—to take TMTG public. The idea is to merge his company with a company that is already public, but has no business to speak of. That would short-circuit the need to have a lengthy IPO. But it also offers a lot of opportunities for the deal to run into trouble, which is what appears to be happening now.

Last September, Trump announced TMTG would merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a SPAC company that had gone public and was looking for a partner. After the proposed deal was revealed, DWAC’s share price rocketed above $97. It has since fallen below $30, where it currently sits. The deal, which caused such excitement initially, was supposed to happen quickly. Like most SPACs, DWAC has rules in its organizing charter that make it clear that the company’s founders have to find a merger partner expeditiously, or else give back the money they raised from investors. The deadline for DWAC to make its merger with TMTG happen is Sept. 8. 

DWAC”s founders have asked investors to approve an extension of that deadline—and on Sept. 6, shareholders will be able to vote to give the company another year to complete the deal. There is no guarantee that investors will approve the deadline extension—although most would likely lose money if the company was forced to shutter itself and return the funds it had raised in its IPO.

On this deadline day edition, Dotun and Andy are joined by Miguel Delaney to discuss the bigger picture of this summer transfer window: Nottingham Forest have spent more than the Eredivisie. 

How has the financial inequality between Europe and the Premier League reached this point? We also discuss what Antony and Lucas Paquetá will bring to English shores, PSG’s dropped points at the weekend, and there’s the small matter of the Champions League draw! Plus, a truly heinous food pick from Dotun…

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Representative-elect Mary Peltola just made history. With a 51-49 upset victory over ex-governor Sarah Palin, confirmed Wednesday by the state’s Division of Elections, Peltola has won Alaska’s sole seat in the House of Representatives—making the former state legislator and fisheries manager the first Alaska Native person elected to Congress. She succeeds longtime GOP Rep. Don Young, a family friend whose death in office earlier this year triggered a special election. In March, when Young died, Peltola was a fairly obscure ex-politician vying with more than 50 challengers to finish his term. By August, polls pegged her as a clear favorite over the Trump-endorsed Palin, whose celebrity kept her at the top of early polls.

Peltola’s win was more than one kind of first. She also becomes the first Alaskan to win a ranked-choice election, a system that sends votes to second-choice candidates when voters’ favorites are knocked out. She joins a tiny club: Alaska is just the second state to adopt the system, which supporters call a “bulwark against extremism,” and this race was the state’s first to use it.

That change came into play when prominent independent Al Gross withdrew from the race unexpectedly—after landing one of four spots in the general election. Gross, Democrats’ favorite in Alaska’s 2020 Senate race, wouldn’t commit to caucusing with the Democratic Party. But his largely centrist voters broke for Peltola, and his withdrawal left a lopsided ballot, splitting conservative voters between two Republican candidates.

Peltola’s biggest challenge might have been Palin’s unmatched celebrity. Although Palin hasn’t held office in Alaska since 2009, when she abruptly resigned her governorship, she’s still Alaska’s best-known politician on the national stage. And Palin’s been a vocal player in the Trump movement, winning the ex-president’s consistent backing—Trump went as far as campaigning for her hours after the FBI’s August raid of his Mar-a-Lago home.

Alaskans, in any case, were keen to participate. State officials announced that they’d counted nearly 200,000 ballots in the open primary, the third-highest primary turnout in state history. There’s any number of reasons that could be: Palin’s notoriety likely drew both supporters and opponents, and the governorship is also on the ballot, with Republican incumbent Mike Dunleavy facing strong Democratic and independent challengers. GOP senior Sen. Lisa Murkowski is up for re-election as well—after landing a place on Trump’s enemies list by voting to convict him for his role in the January 6th attacks on the US Capitol. (Murkowski and her Trump-backed primary opponent, Kelly Tshibaka, both advanced to November’s general election.) The state has also kept the process remarkably accessible, with many voters able to vote early both by mail and in person, a key consideration for Alaskans in distant and rural areas.

LongShots spotlights short-form documentaries nominated by top film festivals