Queen Bees at their Best

06/18/2026

There’s already a big winner ahead of the men’s 2026 FIFA World Cup match happening on Thursday between South Africa and the Czechia in Atlanta: Women.

Three women from the United States will referee the match, and make history as they do.

Tori Penso will be the first U.S. woman to be in charge of a men’s World Cup match when she serves as the head referee for the game.

Another big first? Her fellow woman ref Brooke Mayo, the assistant referee for the game, will be the first out LGBTQ+ official to preside over a men’s FIFA World Cup game.

Mayo has been outspoken about the role soccer played in her life as a q***r girl growing up in Texas, and the way the sport provided an outlet to safely feel like herself despite the dominant cultural norms around her. She first began refereeing at the age of 13 — and continued to officiate matches even while playing soccer for Tennessee Tech University in college. In January, Mayo was named U.S. Soccer Female Referee of the Year.

Kathryn Nesbitt will serve as the third referee.

Thursday’s match will be the second time ever that an all-women trio of referees has been selected to oversee a men’s FIFA World Cup match. Penso, Mayo and Nesbitt have worked together before, officiating the final match of the 2023 women’s FIFA World Cup.

✍️: Jennifer Gerson, reporter
📸: FIFA/Getty Images

06/17/2026

06/17/2026

Men don’t put down woman.

06/02/2026

In 1999, Diane Lane's sister was left by her husband with four children under ten years old and nothing else. No money. No plan. No warning.
Diane took them all in.
For twenty years she raised those four children alongside her own career. She paid for school. For college. She was there for the weddings. She became, in every way that actually counts, their parent.
In 2019, the man who had walked away came back.
He was dying. He was broke. He was alone. He stood at the door and asked for help.
The children he had abandoned were adults now. They had built their lives in the two decades since he had decided they were not worth staying for. Their answer was immediate. Send him away. He had earned nothing from this family.
Diane looked at them and said something they did not expect.
She told them he had taught them what not to be. That she was going to teach them what forgiveness looked like.
She paid for his hospice care.
He died weeks later. Near the end he told her he did not deserve what she was doing for him.
She told him that was exactly the point. That mercy was not about deserving.
The children who had every reason to turn him away watched the woman who had raised them choose something harder than anger and more difficult than justice.
Some lessons cannot be taught in a classroom or explained in a conversation. Some can only be demonstrated at a hospice bedside, for a man who earned none of it, by someone who understood that forgiveness is not a gift to the person receiving it.
It is a gift to everyone watching.