Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

August can often be a bit of a dull time in both sports and news. In sports, most leagues are out of season and for the few that are playing, none of them have imminent playoffs or championships. 

In politics, Congress is on recess and things usually slow down.

Usually.

This year, August has not been usual. There is plenty happening in the sports and political worlds and I have leaned into both.

There’s on-the-ground coverage of two soccer games this weekend and plenty of political stories to cover.

So let’s get right into it! But not before we see Peach, the mascot of this newsletter.

My Reporting

NWSL

Washington

Win, lose, or draw, the Washington Spirit sure do love to play close games decided in the last minutes.

There was the loss on May 2 to Angel City, where rookie Riley Tiernan locked up the win for the LA-based team with a goal deep in stoppage time.

There was the draw on May 17 against the Utah Royals, where despite a rare late penalty kick miss by striker Ashley Hatch, defender Casey Krueger notched a last-minute goal to claw back a tie.

There was the win on August 3 versus the Portland Thorns, with a returning Trinity Rodman scoring a game-winning goal just a few minutes after making her first game appearance in months.

And no shocker but the Spirit left it to the final minutes again Friday night versus Racing Louisville.

Seriously, we need a nickname for this. Cardiac Kids and Heart Attack Hoyas already exist, so there has to be some sort of alliteration. I was trying to think of heart, blood pressure or heartburn-related things and as of now, the best I’ve got is the Alka-Seltzer Spirit. I welcome better ideas.

In the tenth minute of stoppage time, attacker Rosemonde Kouassi potted just her second goal of the season on an explosive shot from just outside the 18-yard box to guarantee the Spirit walked away from Friday’s match with a point in the standings.

It was a full circle moment, as Kouassi had been tussling all night with Racing Louisville’s Ary Borges. One battle between them led to a yellow card for Borges just a few minutes earlier.

But Kouassi completed a nutmeg on Borges, kicking the ball between Borges’s legs and driving past her to create space for the game-tying goal.

In a multilingual postgame interview, Kouassi, who is from Cote D’Ivoire and is still learning English, deferred to her teammate and de facto French-language translator, Canadian defender Gabby Carle, when asked about the clashes between her and Borges.

“I’m putting words in her mouth, but what she wants to say is it was kind of like a revenge feeling, like ‘oh, ok, you foul me?’ Then let me show you what I can do,” Carle said.

And in a bit of a lesson in French football lingo, we learned that their term for a “nutmeg” is a petit pont, or “little bridge.”

The late goal capped a physical and emotional game between Washington and Louisville. Both Spirit players and fans clearly took issue with some of the calls made by referee John Matto, who was officiating just his fourth ever NWSL game.

Spirit star Trinity Rodman took some long pauses while carefully picking her words when speaking to the press after the game.

“How do I say something without saying something?” Rodman asked before briefly putting her head in her hand.

“I don’t think we fouled crazy, if I’m being completely honest. Like, I think we played it really physical and I think we played it well,” Rodman said.

For Louisville, physical and aggressive play has become something of a hallmark for the club.

“I feel like it’s been a really big part of our game this year,” Louisville defender Ellie Jean told me. “We’ve really tried to focus on winning our 1-v-1 battles, our 1-v-1 duels, everyone on the pitch, and that’s gonna help us succeed and tonight we really did that really well.”

Earlier in the match, one of the team’s newest players also made a dramatic entrance. The Spirit signed Italian forward Sofia Cantore in this summer’s transfer window. And while Cantore got her first minutes in the previous game on the road against NJ / NY Gotham FC, Friday marked her first home game and first start.

In the 40th minute, Cantore worked her way up the pitch only to find herself with a ton of space about 30 yards out from the goal. Cantore then made the decision to take an extremely low-percentage shot by launching it from way out there. The ball hung in the air for a few seconds before taking a late dip just under the crossbar and into the net. Just like that, Cantore had her first goal in the United States.

After the game, Cantore was still piecing together just how that worked out and said she’d have to go watch it again, but that it wasn’t the shot she’d usually take.

“From this distance, I don’t know, I don’t usually try,” Cantore said. “But I think it’s kind of, because the defenders were like, going down a lot. So the options were [either] I continue to drive the ball, or maybe I take, I try the shot.”

The game also included a moment that served as a reflection of the broader circumstances that Washingtonians are living through.

Led by the supporters section groups the Spirit Squadron and Rose Room Collective, the crowd of more than 11,000 fans chanted together as soon as the clock hit 51 minutes into the match.

As a reminder of both the District of Columbia’s push to become the 51^st state and the military occupation of the city ordered last week by President Donald Trump, the crowd broke into a chant of “Free DC!”

The crowd’s call echoed not just across the supporters section, but down across the stadium. And it made waves beyond the soccer world, with media outlets covering both sports and politics picking it up.

(Spoiler alert, but more on that later in this newsletter.)

The Spirit have a busy schedule, playing a Tuesday night match in El Salvador against the Salvadoran side Alianza as part of the continent-wide CONCACAF W Gold Up. After that, they had to San Francisco for a game against Bay FC, who will be hosting the match at Oracle Park, home of baseball’s San Francisco Giants.

Louisville heads to San Diego to face the San Diego Wave, who have jumped into second place in the league standings after a win vs Bay FC this past weekend.

North Carolina

Believe it or not, there is still more soccer! I decided to create a long weekend of sports coverage and photography by heading down to Cary, NC to cover a game between the North Carolina Courage and the visiting Portland Thorns.

In a match where both teams often ended up bogged down in the midfield, North Carolina and Portland settled for a 1-1 draw.

Despite a few strong efforts from North Carolina, it was Portland who headed into the locker room at halftime with the lead.

In the 44^th minute, a Portland attack in transition led to a shot by Thorns attacker Reilyn Turner that was saved by Courage keeper Casey Murphy but bounced perfectly for Thorns midfielder Olivia Moultrie to launch a leaping right-footed strike above a trio of Courage defenders and into the top of the net.

The goal was Moultrie’s third of the season and her 13^th career goal. Moultrie is just 19 years old and her goal on Saturday ties her with current Courage player Jaedyn Shaw for most goals by a teen in the NWSL.

“As soon as I played that ball to [Turner,] I was like, ok, ‘get on your horse, Olivia! You need to freaking get in the box!’” Moultrie said. “And then as soon as I saw that ball pop out, I was like, ‘ok, I’m gonna rocket this.’ Like, no thought, just like, connect with the ball and freaking get it on target.”

The second half ended up as a more action-packed affair, with both teams racking up some of their best chances and taking a majority of their shots.

After an evening where Courage winger Tyler Lussi was repeatedly unable to facilitate a goal despite several attempts to cross it in, she took it into her own hands in the 70^th minute.

In a goal that ended up almost being a mirror of Portland’s, North Carolina’s Jaedyn Shaw took a shot from the middle of the box that Thorns keeper Mackenzie Arnold saved but deflected. Lussi surged in from the left side, shooting from a sharp angle toward an extremely tight window in front of Arnold. The ball snaked by the near post and headed into the net, taking a strong bounce off Arnold to stay in the net.

Lussi credited the halftime break for being an opportunity to figure out how to get a goal and tie the game up.

“I think we definitely, like, talked about it, reset, and re-focused. Obviously, things we can work on. And that’s what we did in terms of getting more players in the attack,” Lussi said.

Portland had a few late chances, including a chance for forward Payton Linnehan, who shot it over the target off a corner kick early in stoppage time.

But North Carolina held firm, with Courage keeper Casey Murphy making a total of five saves, including three after the 75^th minute. Close readers of the newsletter may remember Murphy from our Championship edition last year, as she spoke with me after participating in the wild shootout-style contest at the Skills Challenge that weekend.

The five saves on Saturday put Murphy at 400 career saves across her five NWSL seasons.

“I pride myself on continually trying to grow and not getting complacent. And every goal I let in, I try and go back and look at it, and try not to make the same mistake over, try to make improvements, and that helps me get to making more saves and helping the team stay in games more, and helping us win games,” Murphy said after the game.

Murphy also credited acting head coach Nathan Thackeray, who has stepped in following the Courage’s dismissal of head coach Sean Nahas earlier this month.

Thackeray had been serving as the team’s goalkeeper coach and worked extensively with Murphy.

“The growth hasn’t stopped. There’s still things she has to get better at but she’s had tremendous growth in her overall game. Not just in shot stopping and making saves but her holistic game has gotten better,” Thackeray said.

The Courage head to Chicago to play the last-place Chicago Stars on Friday, while the Thorns head back home to host the first-place Kansas City Current on Saturday.

MSNBC

It’s been a busy news month with things like the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska and battles over the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Heck, the network even announced it’ll be changing its name later this year!

But I want to go back and highlight a story we did a little while ago that spotlights a citizen rather than an elected official or a household name.

I was able to work on an interview our host Jen Psaki did with Cesar Vasquez, a 17-year-old from California. He is the son of two immigrants who work on farms in the area and every morning, he joins a group of people in his community who wake up at 4 am to check the area for ICE agents.

Vasquez has organized a movement through his advocacy group La Cultura del Mundo that started with a school walkout in February and built up to over two dozen protests across the country on August 1.

One moment that stood out to me was when we zoomed out and Jen asked him about how much he feels that this has, in a way, taken away his childhood.

“I’ve accepted that my childhood has been taken away from me. And that is nothing compared to the childhoods and the lives that are being taken from these six and eight-year-olds where their mother is being deported or their father is being deported,” Vasquez said.

“And so in a lot of ways it sucks that I don’t get to have my firsts as a dumb teenager, but I go to sleep every night and get the very limited sleep so that no other 17-year-old has to do this.”

I also got to have two intersections between my sports coverage and my job.

On Saturday, MSNBC published an op-ed I wrote on the recent series of incidents where people in the crowd have thrown sex toys onto the court at WNBA games.

At least one of the suspects arrested for the incidents said he did it to go viral and a group promoting a dildo-themed crypto coin also claimed responsibility for the incidents.

As these men chase clout and cash, they completely ignore the fact that things are still different for women and that women’s sports have a deep history, including in recent years, of sexual harassment and abuse. 

In a particularly ironic, although unsurprising twist, a handful of the loudest voices who claim to want to “save women’s sports” when it ties into their attacks on the rights of transgender people are egging on the harassment here.

In one example, Donald Trump Jr. posted what looks like an AI picture of his father, the president of the United States, throwing a green dildo from the roof of the White House down onto a court of mostly Black basketball players on the ground below. 

Seriously, you can’t make this up.

If you would like to read my full thoughts, you can do so here.

And on Monday evening, we even folded in some of the weekend soccer reporting I did, as the “Free DC” chants at the game made it onto the edition of The Rachel Maddow Show that I helped produce.

Minor League Baseball

On the way back from North Carolina, things lined up so that I could stop in Richmond, VA for a minor league baseball game.

I stopped by The Diamond, the ballpark for the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the Double-A level affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.

Yes, that is their real name. They squared off against the Altoona Curve, the affiliate for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I only lasted a few innings before checking out from heat, humidity and a desire to get home at a reasonable time, but was able to snap some photos and take in the experience.

It’s a strange ballpark, visible from a ways away because of its massive, towering grandstand that is comparable in size to a major league ballpark but is only one gigantic deck and only goes roughly from third base to first base.

At the end of the season, it will close and be replaced by a new stadium being built across the street.

The current stadium’s setup allows for some commanding views of the game and the city in the distance. It looks like somebody started a major league ballpark but stopped a quarter of the way through, but the team has clearly worked hard to give some warmth to an otherwise austere setting.

There are plenty of concession stands and bar areas built into the concourse and it’s easy to roam from section to section.

The modern safety improvement of expanding netting to stretch from one end of the grandstand to the other made it a little hard to snap pictures without the net getting in the way and ruining the focus on my camera but I still got some good shots in.

Leaving early at a park like this also had a silver lining. There are no seats behind the outfield walls and everything beyond the fence is open to the public. I walked around the wall before I left, curious to see if a leadoff home run hit by Giants prospect Bo Davidson was still there a couple innings later. It was, and I was able to head home with a home run ball that I didn’t exactly catch but nobody else fielded.

Something Good I Ate

I was in Cincinnati last weekend for my dear friend and former college roommate Rahul Desai’s birthday (he’s incredibly smart and has a newsletter of his own about AI and the job market… go subscribe!)

Sure, we had some great food to celebrate his birthday, but a couple of us from the East Coast had not yet had Skyline Chili. So after all the nice meals, we decided to check off a stop that I’m sure he’s taken pretty much every other visitor to (at least the ones who aren’t vegetarian.)

If you don’t know about the Cincinnati chili that Skyline serves, it is not the thick, tomatoey mix you’re thinking of.

The chili itself is thin, with notes of spices like clove and nutmeg, and ground meat resembling what you’d find in the Greek dish moussaka. It makes sense, since the dish was created by Greek and Macedonian immigrants to the city almost a century ago.

You can get it on hot dogs or French fries, sure, but the most famous (or infamous) option is to order it as a 3-way, 4-way or 5-way.

As the base, you have spaghetti. Then, you layer the chili on top. Then, you take an entire bag’s worth of neon-orange shredded cheddar cheese and pour it on top, as is. With these three ingredients, you have a 3-way.

For a 4-way, you add one of beans or raw chopped onions, and for a 5-way, you add both. 

Sit down at a place like Skyline and you end up in a fast-food restaurant with table service. You can see a group of employees, some delightful teenagers and twenty-somethings, doing relatively little cooking and laying on pre-made ingredients. Between that and most of the other customers being young kids and their families, it definitely felt like I was about to get a school lunch.

Nothing can really prepare you for the first time you see this ungodly, visually unhinged dish.

Seriously, look at this.

With the amount of cheese on there it feels less like you’re eating spaghetti or chili as much as you’re about to eat the Nickelodeon logo.

The ingredients and the look of it disgust a lot of folks. I’ve definitely delivered my share of potshots at Cincinnati for putting all of this together and calling it chili.

But then I took a bite.

And then I took another.

I felt like a 5-year-old or like I had the taste buds of some rube who has only had bland, tasteless food in his life.

Because as much as I expected my taste buds to revolt, this glowing dish of doom was good. Genuinely, unironically good.

It was fast-food quality, and I don’t think I’ll crawl through broken glass to have it on a weekly basis, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that every couple of months will probably strike me with a deep craving.

After a weekend there, I think I can say it’s a fitting dish to represent Cincinnati. Its reputation precedes itself. It’s strange-looking and seemingly dangerous. You might be asking yourself: Why are you going there? Why are you eating this?

But then you go there, and you see the neighborhoods with charming, colorful houses. You see the old markets, the lush, green parks, and river beds that can double as swimming holes. You dig into your dish to find a pleasant mix of meat, dairy and starch, with depth and a bit of crunch from those little onions.

You walk in expecting to be disgusted, and you come out a fan of something that, under what seemed like a gross exterior, is actually quite pleasant.