2025-06-23 05:16:48
The inevitable has happened. The Phoenix Suns have traded Kevin Durant to the Houston Rockets, as first reported by Shams Charania. In return for the 36-year-old 15-time All-Star, Phoenix gets Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the No. 10 pick in this year's draft, and five future second-round picks.
The Rockets reportedly made Durant's small list of preferred trade destinations, but the Suns were still able to wrangle a decent haul for the perennially disgruntled superstar. For his part, Durant learned he was being traded while on stage for a panel at Fanatics Fest in New York City.
2025-06-21 05:32:07
A week before I was hired at Defector, I decided to quit vaping. This was kind of a while ago now, but I still have good days and bad. Today is a good day; I haven't even needed a patch today. Yesterday was a rough one. On rough days, I will go buy one single shitty poverty cigar—the brainchild of the Phillies' owner's dad, the Black & Mild wood tip. This is a multi-pronged strategy: I love wood tips, but I rarely smoke a whole one in a sitting, no matter how hard up I might be. Also, everyone around you will think less of you if you do this. A key feature of cravings is self-loathing, and it sort of feels deserved that people will see me: a questionably dressed yet ostensibly grown woman smoking a cigar that is usually purchased with coins. Weakness ought to feel like weakness.
Last night, I had already smoked through my cigar of the day. Since my trip to New York, I'm staying with my aunt and uncle in La Crosse, Wis. for a little while before I drive the rest of the way back from to Tacoma. As the evening pushed forward, I was putting on an impressively brave face for them. Across the river in Winona, a thunderstorm had rolled in, lighting up the sky brilliantly, and the air was so thick you had a real sense for what was clapping back together when the lightning left its jagged vacuums. My aunt and uncle are big nerds (complimentary) about weather. They have a little plane and are spending their retirement bouncing around America with only Mother Nature to play defense. I'm a curious sort, so I leaned into that, hanging on every word they spoke. I begged them to explain more about how the wind played tricks on a small aircraft. I was desperate for distraction from the withdrawal. But after a while they got tired and turned in for the night. I couldn't take my car to satisfy my craving, because that would involve noisily opening the garage, which would be an embarrassing reveal of me making a whole trip to collect a second John Middleton product in just one Thursday. So I would go on foot.
2025-06-21 04:02:58
Fifty years ago, the hot comedy skit was Saturday Night Live’s “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”, a play on the coverage of the Spanish dictator’s demise. That gag came to mind when I read yet another update on the terminally ill Washington Post, a newspaper that I delivered each morning back when the Franco punchline and the newspaper were among the biggest deals in town.
Washington City Paper reported earlier this week that, after this weekend, the Post will no longer have a standalone Metro section in its print edition. The paper told subscribers about the move in an email from executive editor Matt Murray. From City Paper’s story:
2025-06-21 03:10:32
For the first time in American sports history, a team has been sold on an 11-figure valuation. News broke Wednesday that the Buss family has agreed to sell a controlling share of Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter of TWG Global and Guggenheim Partners in a deal valuing the franchise at $10 billion. That is the largest-ever valuation at sale for a North American sports franchise, smashing the high-water mark recently set by the private equity guy who agreed to buy the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion. Walter taking over and doing so at such a steep price is obviously interesting, though the bigger story is the Buss family finally cashing out, as they were the flag-bearers for a type of sports owner that is quickly being bought out of the business.
Jerry Buss bought the Lakers, the NHL's Kings, and the Los Angeles Forum in 1979 for $67.5 million. At the time, that sale price was a record high for a team, and though sports teams are the sort of asset that always appreciate in value, few would have predicted that the valuation of the team would increase by 15,000 percent over the following 46 years. In that time period, the collective identity of NBA ownership steadily changed. The used car dealer who owned the Utah Jazz sold the team, through his widow, to a tech billionaire. The NBA forced racist slumlord Donald Sterling to sell the Los Angeles Clippers to one of the richest men in the country. The Maloof brothers, inheritors of beer distribution riches, ran out of money and sold the Sacramento Kings to another much richer tech guy. Most of the people who own teams now are billionaires, and 20 percent of the league is now owned by people who made their billions in private equity.
2025-06-21 02:48:33
The best pitchers in baseball were going to pitch on the same day! In the same place! Walking distance from my home! On a day I didn’t have to work! This dream confluence would give me a chance to watch reigning Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, always a delight, and my first in-person look at Pirates ace Paul Skenes. Skenes had pitched in Detroit last year—also in the second game of a doubleheader that began with a Skubal start—but I’d missed it because I was in New York at company meetings for my (dumb) job and only caught a few minutes when Jasper gave us breaks from looking at his impressive charts.
Some fans complained that the two aces would not start in the same game on Thursday, though as someone with plans to attend both, this didn’t especially bother me. What did annoy me was it being a split doubleheader: I’d have to buy separate tickets, and leave and come back. A small price to pay, I reasoned, for what was sure to be the greatest day of my baseball-watching life. Around 12:30, the Tigers announced that the 1:10 first game would begin in a rain delay. A slightly larger but still small price to pay, I reasoned, for what was sure to be the greatest day of my baseball-watching life. I waited out the delay at home, enjoying the broadcast’s interstitial highlight reel of new Pirates manager and former Tiger Don Kelly.
2025-06-21 02:14:25
Reading or watching the news has become a real nightmare for me, as I imagine it must be for anyone reading this. Each day seems to bring some new horror or tragedy, and if the non-stop procession of bad news itself doesn't desensitize you, there's all those hucksters out there trying to sell you the idea that, actually, your empathy is wrong. It's enough to make you want to check out of everything altogether.
And plenty of people have. One of the worst byproducts of Trump's second electoral victory was a refrain I heard a lot, usually from other black people: this concept of "resting." The idea starts with the fact that, going back at least to the civil rights movement, black people have spent so much time fighting for our humanity and our communal betterment, only to watch the white-supremacist power structure repeatedly thwart any possibility of radical, positive change. And so, if white people and those who hope to sidle up to white supremacy are so determined to hold onto power, even if it means destroying themselves in the process, then we should let them. Our time now is the time to disengage from the political carousal and do what was best for ourselves. Black self-care as a political ideology unto itself.
