2026-10-08 01:51:31
Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at [email protected].
This week, Chris answers a question about a child who simply will not play alone.
2026-10-08 00:56:27
I have tried over the past year and change to find a succinct way to tell this story and instead only keep coming up with longer and more elaborate versions. So: Way back in law school I read a lot of John Buchan novels. If you are not familiar with John Buchan, know that he wrote a series of thrillers, one of which was made into a Hitchcock movie, and that he was also Governor General of Canada. Reading Buchan was not the first time I had heard of him; when I was a small child, I had a set of E. Nesbit books published by (I think) Puffin and in the back pages they would advertise other books for young readers and Buchan was basically always in there along with, I’m pretty sure, H. Rider Haggard’s She, which paints a somewhat strange picture of what Puffin thought small children needed, book-wise. The John Buchan books are actually pretty good, even if Buchan himself was just as high on British imperialism and its associated tenets as his day job might lead you to expect.
I can’t remember why I started reading Buchan, but I suspect it was because I found him at the used bookstore I went to in those days, which mostly sold books from the estates of dead professors and was staffed by an astonishingly handsome guy whom I once overheard on the phone with a friend saying, “Yeah, we broke up because she wanted to start a family and I wanted to start a revolution.” It was one in a line of great bookstores I have known, and also I enjoyed the vague feeling of cosplaying as a well-educated white guy from the ‘50s, the kind of guy who would turn to John Buchan in his leisure hours. I chain-smoked, which really sold the bit.
I read the Buchan books and liked them, if not as much as the advertisements in Puffin had led me to believe I would. Maybe you had to be a small child. But I read them one after another, checking them out of the university library from a section in the stacks where I never saw anyone else, taking them on the bus trip upstate to spend Christmas with my grandmother. In my recollection it is late at night at my grandmother’s apartment, snow on the ground outside, and I am reading one of these books and I am stopped dead because I am reading a sentence I have read before. It is a sentence describing the beauty of some birds—I remember them as geese—flying in a way that invokes the evening sky and the black wings against it, followed by a very prosaic but also precise rendering of how much fat these birds put on before winter or how far they can fly or something.
2026-10-07 23:58:09
Dylan Larkin is still a Red Wing, even though he doesn't want to be. His offseason trade request, arriving after 11 seasons with the club and a mere five playoff games (all as a rookie), symbolized the franchise's inability to shift out of neutral and forced fans to stare the worst-case scenario in the face: After all these years of waiting, maybe the Wings remain closer to the No. 1 draft pick than a playoff run. As the team's second-best goal-scorer and top-line center, Larkin would be impossible to replace quickly, so him deciding that he's given up on this project and would rather just get to the postseason with a contender, now that he's in his 30s, is a frustrating setback.
It's an issue, too, that has yet to be resolved as the Red Wings wrap their first week of regular-season play. The list of teams that Larkin is reportedly willing to waive his no-movement clause for is tiny and elite (not to mention cap-crunched), and Detroit, which doesn't even have a non-interim GM at the moment, has yet to swing a deal. Consequently, Larkin was stripped of his team captaincy, and he got lustily booed by fans when his name was announced on opening night. He sat out the first two losses of the season with injury, while the Wings allowed five goals over four-and-a-half periods before they even got on the board. And when he returned to the ice in front of a sad-looking turnout Tuesday night against Ottawa, those who chose to voice their opinion were generally not happy to see him.
But this game played out differently than the Wings' previous poor showings. While Ottawa got the first goal not even three minutes in, the men in red mounted a meaningful response, scoring four straight en route to a 5-3 win. And it was Larkin who played the biggest role of anyone—not as a pariah, but as a talented forward who has consistently injected at least a little bit of light into otherwise dark passages.
2026-10-07 23:50:16
If you missed last week’s Thursday Night Football tilt between the Steelers and Browns, don’t grieve. The game itself was inessential, and Amazon Prime’s coverage of the game all but incentivized the audience to do anything else with its evening. That’s because Amazon’s broadcast team decided to treat Browns QB Deshaun Watson, a proven and unrepentant menace to women, with the kind of soft-focus treatment usually reserved for diabetic Olympians. Watson was feted in the pregame show, during the main telecast, and even in the postgame. Under normal circumstances, this coverage would have been vile. In the wake of a Cornell rape scandal that has become national news, it’s somehow even more galling. There’s a way to talk about Watson, and the 3-1 Browns, without stooping lower than hell’s seventh circle. So Arif Hasan and I endeavored to do just that on this week’s episode of All Ball.
Thankfully, there’s more. As our newborn show continues its steady development into becoming an elite podcast, we have tweaked the format of All Ball by rating every game, throwgasm-style, instead of blithely picking it. We also made sure to carve out ample time to make fun of the strugggggling Eagles, talk up the surprisingly awesome Jaguars, and attempt to make sense of the undefeated but offense-less Vikings. All of that was WAYYYYY more fun to talk about than Deshaun Watson, lemme tell ya.
2026-10-07 23:31:19
Every season, there’s a particular sort of novel that elicits its own genre of disdain. It’s somehow “too personal” and also lacking in “depth.” It’s called things like indulgent, trashy, lazy, artless, frivolous, embarrassing, or perhaps just very online. This is the mauvais genre of our times, the gimmick of the not-quite-memoir, autofiction. Over the summer, as Rachel Cusk’s Life of M: A Novel took its turn, Grace Byron remarked that by now, speculation over the genre’s boundaries of fact and fiction is “its own bloodsport.” Since its rise in the 2010s, “the only thing trendier and triter than writing autofiction is hating autofiction,” as Sanjena Sathian put it in 2022. But why, if it is so silly and unserious, does this genre seem to pose such an enduring threat?
To perennial debates over autofiction and much else, Sarah Brouillette’s latest book Content Machines is a welcome redirection from questions of literary merit to a sharp historical analysis of the contemporary publishing industry—and many of its attendant anxieties. Brouillette, a literary scholar and Marxist-feminist whose cultural criticism has appeared in Defector, continues the interventionary work of her previous books on UNESCO, the creative economy, and the global literary marketplace, regarding contemporary questions about the “fate of the literary”: "We are told to worry about the threats to literary art’s essential moral seriousness, distinction, difficulty, and purpose," as she writes in Content Machines. "We are warned that publishing today is overrun with what are basically entitled consumers: ideologically inflexible, uncomfortable with hard ideas and disagreement, untrained, incapable of nuanced thought, and always on the edge of tears or outage." Rather than stoking the panic, Content Machines historically situates it, uncovering urgent political questions about an era of publishing permeated by digital platforms such as Wattpad, Kindle, and Audible, and social media phenomena like BookTok and Bookstagram.
Content Machines examines digital platforms as “technologies of precarity,” instrumental to the ever-worsening labor conditions in publishing. More specifically, Brouillette conceives of platforms as forces of feminization. It’s not just that women are doing more of the jobs and that the jobs are getting worse. Women are doing more of these jobs precisely because they are worse. “The more work in writing and publishing becomes available only to those willing to do it on a contingent basis,” as Brouillette explains, “the more it is likely to be women doing it,” as workers accustomed “to low-prestige work and to taking jobs that allow them to continue with housework and childcare.” This is the case across many workforces, and what we’re always really talking about whenever masculinity is in “crisis.”
2026-10-07 23:03:34
The single discordant note in the otherwise effervescent National League Divisional Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres so far was a brief shot of new Padres owners Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones watching Game 3. It was easy to imagine them, less than two months into the new gig, assuming that it would always be like this. All they know is winning two out of every three games, playing before sold-out houses, and learning cool inside-baseball phrases like "Goddammit, Merrill." They'll find out soon that this sort of thing is too good to last.
This series has not only been the best of the eight played so far in this postseason, but the best in years. Two indisputably accomplished teams, each with very different approaches and without the burdens of franchise legacy, have played taut and delightful baseball replete with stuff like speed, athletic defense, rapid-response scoring, bold tactical choices, and pitching being tested but only occasionally bested. It's the stuff that makes watching your $3.9 billion investment action worth the bother of coming to the park. All that, and "Goddammit, Merrill" too.
The Padres extended the series at least a day with an incandescent 4-3 win Tuesday night, and they now trail the Brewers, the best team in the game during the regular season, 2-1 in a not-enough-games-no-matter-who-wins series. All three games have been decided by one run and hung precariously in the balance to the end. That was most thrilling in Game 2, when Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio's walk-off hit in the gap scored two runs and stole the result from the Padres and their overpowering Padres closer Mason Miller. Because some ethereal things are happening here, Chourio opened Game 3 with a similar drive, only to have it seized before it landed by a diving San Diego center fielder Jackson Merrill, the name behind the curse.
