2025-12-06 03:57:33
I started going back to the 1970s last winter because I was convinced everything and everyone else was, too. This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal years of national self-harm by watching a bunch of movies in which Gene Hackman scowled and wore weird hats and drank what was very clearly some absolutely dogshit coffee out of paper cups was something close to the healthiest possible scenario. The idea, if there was an idea, was both to get attuned to the frequencies and manias of that particular low and dishonest decade in the hope that there might be some lessons there, and maybe also to remind myself that national moments of humiliation, failure, and loss come and go in the same ways that personal ones do.
That is, they pass. American history tells us that the problems that make all that trouble do not ever get resolved, let alone solved; we don't really do that here. This country loves its problems too much, or has just mistaken them for virtues so willfully and for so long that it can't imagine living without them; in the absence of a more representative politics, or maybe as a sort of satire of it, politics collapses into various ways to perform being upset. None of this is especially dignified, or remotely What You Want. All of it feels both like it is too dumb and unworkable to last, and like it is getting worse.
2025-12-06 03:39:57
On Friday, after an interminable procession of songs, skits, interviews, and speeches, including Donald Trump accepting a knock-off Peace Prize, FIFA's 2026 World Cup draw ceremony finally did the only thing anyone actually cared about. (If that sentence sounds somewhat familiar, there's a reason, and it's that FIFA has unfortunately settled on a bloated format for the draw, made only more bloated by the sheer Americanness of this edition.) With just over six months until the start of the tournament, and with six spots still left to be decided by various playoffs in March, the general skeleton of the first 48-team World Cup has been sorted out. Here it is:
2025-12-06 02:51:49
The passage of time remains undefeated: LeBron James's double-digit scoring streak is over.
James's run of putting up 10 or more points in every game since Jan. 5, 2007—George W. Bush was the president! The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't even exist yet!—is not one of the greatest or most important accomplishments of his career, though it captures something essential about the nature of his decades-long dominance. Ten points is not that many points, and plenty of players can average double-digit points for a half-decade and wind up playing overseas with little ceremony. But 1,297 games is so many; it's a ton of games for even a great NBA player to merely appear in. It's 383 more games than Allen Iverson played in his whole career, and 98 more than the 1,119 wins the Charlotte Hornets have in their 36 years of existence. LeBron's 1,297-game double-digit scoring streak tells the story of a remarkably consistent player, someone who has been great across three distinct eras, in every situation, for 23 years. Dwyane Wade was drafted alongside James and played for 16 years, until 2019. James scored 10 or more points in every game he played for the next five years.
2025-12-06 00:00:20
Throughout the first season of The Chair Company, the protagonist Ron Trosper (Tim Robinson) goes to many places that he should not. He chases unsettling men and curious leads through parking lots, dingy apartment buildings, hoarder houses, government records offices, strip-mall eateries, precarious dive bars, and derelict business parks. But none of that compares to the thrill of seeing where he went in the very first episode: the site footer.
“A <footer> typically contains information about the author of the section, copyright data or links to related documents,” is how the Mozilla Developer Network describes a footer HTML element. Wikipedia’s current stub of an article on the web standard notes that “common items that are included or linked to from footers are copyright, sitemaps, privacy policies, terms of use, contact details and directions.” You know, the stuff nobody ever reads. It also notes that “infinite scrolling cannot be used in combination with footers, because the footer becomes inaccessible,” which implies that the footer is, in some respects, antiquated.
2025-12-05 23:56:40
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.
Israel: It’s conference championship weekend … a thing that matters! Right? There are rematches and gritty duels and a 1 vs. 2 matchup between undefeated juggernauts, and no one can be bothered to give much of a shit about any of it. Is it the expanded playoff’s fault? Have they really ruined conference championships the way they ruined the bowls and threaten to ruin the regular season as a whole? It’s hard to disagree with that idea. This year especially, it feels like the sport has devolved from significant games that build toward a national championship matchup to a rankings-reveal television show orchestrated by a shadowy committee, where the games merely provide window dressing. This is not just about whether Notre Dame should be in the playoff; it is about the playoff debate itself overwhelming the sport. Not one outcome from this weekend will actually determine anything regarding the playoff. It all comes down to what the committee decides they want, which is what’s good for their television show: a new era of fantasy football.
2025-12-05 22:06:22
In Hal Hartley’s new film Where to Land, a 58-year-old director of romantic comedies applies to become a groundskeeper at a graveyard. The director, played by frequent Hartley collaborator Bill Sage, is putting together his last will and testament, taking stock of his life in both the material and metaphysical sense. Joe, Sage’s character, must make a list of his belongings—his kitchen table, the china from his first marriage, the rights to his films—while looking to contribute something more “useful and perennial” to the world.
Hartley burst onto the independent film scene in the early 1990s with films like The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and Amateur. Those films contain many conventional Hollywood narrative techniques, but they are full to the point of bursting with philosophical discussions of love, politics, family, and religion, all addressed at a pace and in ways that rarely appear in traditional studio films. Hartley’s status as a filmmaker springs from those abrupt changes of pace and his uncommon, uncanny comfort with contradiction.
