The Wrong Newsletter: Three Faults

Week of June 21–27, 2026

Here's what I keep coming back to about faults — geological ones, predictive ones. They run quiet beneath the surface. You almost forget they're there. Then the ground moves.

Wednesday morning. A 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Redwood Valley in Mendocino County. Shaking from San Francisco to Eureka. Cracked walls, some injuries, a lot of startled people. Eighty-seven percent of us said it wouldn't happen. The Mendocino Triple Junction — one of the most seismically active zones in North America — apparently doesn't read our confidence intervals.

The earth doesn't adjust its behavior for the majority vote.

Then there was Turkey.

Sixty-eight percent of us had the US men's team finishing group play undefeated Thursday night. Host nation energy. Two straight wins. Turkey was winless. It felt like a formality — and formalities are the worst kind of prediction, because you stop watching for signals.

Turkey won 3-2. In stoppage time. A last-touch poke from a substitute that nobody who watched the match will forget. The US still topped Group D and advanced. But what we should have noticed: Turkey had nothing to lose and a compact defense. Teams with nothing to lose are dangerous. That's not a soccer truth. That's just a truth.

Then Iran.

Draw. Draw. Draw. Three group matches, three ties. Sixty-eight percent of us thought they'd break the pattern against Egypt on Friday. They didn't. A late goal from Khalilzadeh looked like a dramatic winner — the Iranian bench stormed the pitch — and then VAR pulled it back for the narrowest possible offside. 1-1. Three draws. Iran advances as a third-place qualifier, still waiting on the math.

Three times in a row should have been a clue. It rarely is.

We called an 87% shot wrong. We had two near-identical 68% misses in the same week. And we're not even in the hard part yet — the knockout round starts now, and these games count for everything.

Next week's questions are already up. Come help us be wrong again.

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