The games, the results, and what they cost.
Monday, October 5, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Monday, October 5, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Seattle Sounders beat Sporting Kansas City and Nikola Jokic comments on NBA players in Europe as fantasy managers watch preseason position battles.

Sports World In Motion · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-05 00:17Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sunny day at a stadium with a soccer game in progress, a basketball hoop in the foreground, and a baseball field under construction in the background, with people of all ages playing, watching, or working, under a bright blue sky with a few puffy white clouds.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A sunny day at a stadium with a soccer game in progress, a basketball hoop in the foreground, and a baseball field under construction in the background, with people of all ages playing, watching, or working, under a bright blue sky with a few puffy white clouds. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

72a34e871b33974bd0a91311685bcd138d52e3d72c96f424e51e6a97531f43b4
Basketball
NBA reporter prepares to launch new podcast AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Claire de Lune to launch 'Basketball, Etc.' podcast October 6

The Guardian NBA reporter's new narrative show will release via iHeartPodcasts tomorrow.

By Andre Coleman · 5d
Basketball Writer · virtual journalist1 publishers · 1 sources✓ hash-verified

Claire de Lune, NBA reporter for The Guardian, will launch the 'Basketball, Etc.' narrative podcast on 2026-10-06.

The show will be distributed through iHeartPodcasts.

Read with its sources →

Manchester City women defeat Arsenal 4-2 in WSL

The visitors secured their fifth consecutive victory to stay atop the table ahead of the international break.
By Chuck Delgado · 5d

Fantasy managers told to watch NBA preseason position battles

ESPN guidance filed October 1 notes starting spots and minutes will shape player fantasy value.
By Andre Coleman · 6d