2026-09-18 04:51:48
Steve Belichick has resigned from his job as defensive coordinator at UNC following an investigation that found "certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina's values and standards of conduct," according to a statement released Thursday by the university. Belichick, the son of head coach Bill Belichick, already had been on medical leave.
This follows Mike Lombardi resigning earlier this month from his job as general manager.
Little else has been made public by UNC about what led to Lombardi and Steve Belichick's resignations. The university's statement described "a thorough and independent investigation into allegations related to culture and climate within the Carolina football program." It went on to say that the investigation found that what happened was "isolated in scope and not a systemic failure."
2026-09-18 03:43:54
Rory Dames—the women’s soccer coach currently banned for life from the NWSL, and who has been accused of abuse by more than a dozen former youth players—is no longer listed in the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s centralized disciplinary database.
According to a document reviewed by Defector, Dames was removed from the database because a one-year suspension by SafeSport has ended. Per the document, he remains on probation for five years and under a no-contact directive, but those sanctions do not limit his involvement in soccer. The document did not say if his probation started after his suspension ended, or if it ran concurrently.
A person who was interviewed for SafeSport’s investigation told Defector they were informed about the sanctions against Dames on July 28 of last year, at which point the former coach and SafeSport were already embroiled in a legal battle. The interviewee was therefore under the impression that the decision was not final, and that the one-year suspension had not started yet.
2026-09-18 03:14:11
Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them.
Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent. But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work."
2026-09-18 01:00:27
There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in a 2025 New Yorker column.
Over the years, Trump’s been called a number of epithets. Cruel, heartless, old, stupid. There remains a collective nervousness around calling Trump a fascist, and few writers avail themselves of words like “evil.” Susan Neiman has been interested in the problem of evil for most of her career as a moral philosopher. Her 2002 book, Evil in Modern Thought traced the history of philosophy as a matter of different responses to the existence of evil. So it’s surprising that her latest book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, is curiously cagey about the current President’s alignment.
Neiman has written multiple books about theodicy, the problem with woke culture, and why progressives would benefit from more moral clarity. Her new book allows her to play the hits under a provocative title, but with little novelty. She never quite gets around to taking on Trump directly despite the little book’s title. Across seven chapters, Neiman considers the importance of discussing morality, the empty ideology the Trump admin has used to justify its actions, and how we must shift away from identity politics and liberalism and towards socialism. She argues that the left has ceded moral ground by claiming materialism instead of ideology—though her thinking about both seem muddy. Her ideas about ideology contain a lot of materialism and her ideas about materialism are undergirded by ideology. She dives into the discourse with a lot of cynicism around Marx, communism, Judith Butler, and big woke. “Many progressives were sick at heart about it, though they confessed it only to close friends, preferably after a glass of wine,” she quips about the latter. Identity politics is tribalism, rather than materialism. Like many philosophers, she seems to let the distortions of identity politics on both the right and the left distort the idea of standing up for minorities as not just a social issue, but a civic one. Whose materialism matters?
2026-09-17 23:59:46
This week on the show, Harry and I hung out with the hosts of the State of the League podcast for an hour of classic offseason nonsense. We talked about Paul Schrader getting really into AI, which aging stars should be allowed to do steroids, and Brice Sensabaugh. Oh, you're not familiar with Brice Sensabaugh, the fourth-year shooting guard for the Utah Jazz? Well, you're about to be, as I am confident no other NBA podcast has dedicated this much of its runtime to talking about Brice Sensabaugh.
You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!
2026-09-17 23:42:13
The Moon got whacked. The Moon gets whacked a lot, honestly. You can just look at its beaten, cratered surface to see that. But these days we're pretty good at counting its scars. Since 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and constantly imaging its surface, and both computers and humans check those images closely to see if there have been any new kablammos since the last photograph. There often are. The LRO can spot craters as small as 30 feet across, caused by space rocks roughly the size of a monster truck tire. (NASA's comparison, not mine! And honestly a helpful one.) Those happen about 140 times a year. While you wouldn't want to be under one when it impacted, those smaller collisions are basically lunar weather.
But every once in a while, something big comes in. Something big enough to get its own name. Say hello to McGetchin, the Moon's newest crater. It's large, and it's fresh—having been born at some point between April 11 and May 22, 2024, the two nearest passes of the LRO. A small bright spot that hadn't been there in the previous photo, according to McGetchin's discoverer, Robert Wagner. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said. The bright patch was typical of previously buried regolith, lunar rock and dust scattered by the impact.
Wagner discovered the new crater in images taken by the LRO's wide-angle camera, which captures more of the surface at a time. After that it was time to point the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at McGetchin to make out more detail, and McGetchin looks pretty rad in close-up. The before and after of the same spot on the Moon's surface:
