2026-01-09 04:22:41
We at The Distraction HQ do not need much of an excuse to invite ESPN NFL ace and Defector comrade emeritus Kalyn Kahler onto the program. We think she's great at her job and great at talking about it, and the frequency with which she's joined us to speak excitedly about the NFC North and generally "deal with our shit" speaks for itself. But she did make it easy for us this week, with a big, anecdote-rich ESPN story, written with ESPN Raiders reporter Ryan McFadden, on the unusually complicated, surprisingly novel, extremely predictable carnage in the Las Vegas Raiders front office, and sideline, and owner's suite, and I guess also in the offensive line meeting room. Just having to do with the Raiders in general. I suppose one could just write "it is a story about the Raiders" here, in retrospect.
2026-01-09 02:58:12
Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the sequence of events, the indignant language and informational smokescreens felt nauseatingly familiar. It was as if someone had taken Israel's playbook for Gaza and tested it out stateside.
You don't have to leave the city, much less the state or country, to find precedent of law enforcement slaughtering the people they're supposed to protect. It's an American tradition already illustrated by many devastated families and callous police union presidents. But for years now, both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government has modeled how to act with both viciousness and total impunity. That in turn has affected the efficacy of public pressure in other parts of the world. Entities within the sphere of U.S. power have realized that it is even easier to slaughter a person in the street and get away with it.
2026-01-09 02:23:44
The bad thing about the NBA regular season is that it's too long. The good thing about it is that it's long enough for rich, intriguing storylines to develop. Consider the case of the best team in basketball.
One month ago, the dialogue around the Oklahoma City Thunder centered not on their chances of repeating as champions, the certainty of which was already established as a discursive given, but on whether they could mount a serious assault on the 2016 Golden State Warriors' mythic 73-win season. The latter is the most difficult team accomplishment in basketball, and yet it still wasn't a heretical topic, because the Thunder had so completely dominated the first-third of the NBA season, posting a 24-1 record, a plus-17.2 net rating, and a defense so good that the gap between itself and the second-best unit (7.4 points per 100) was wider than the gap between second place and 24th.
2026-01-09 02:07:09
By now you've almost certainly seen the video for yourself, or read about it: an ICE agent shooting a Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, in the head from point-blank range, killing her as she attempted to drive away from the scene of an immigration sting where protesters had gathered on Wednesday. The agent's actions, caught from several angles on video now widely available across all forms of visual media, are indefensible. By any human standard the shooting is a murder, made all the more appalling by the Trump administration's rush to exonerate the murderer with obvious lies, and paint the victim, an unarmed U.S. citizen guilty of nothing more than perhaps having panicked when masked agents surrounded her car and tried to yank her out of it, as a terrorist and would-be killer.
The murder and the response seem to have shocked the nation; they've even largely driven Trump's unlawful invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president down the figurative and physical page. Here is what Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar has to say about it:
2026-01-09 01:52:32
The San Jose Sharks, who own the eighth-best record in the Western Conference, are a top-heavy team with a lot of growing left to do. But my god, what a top. The 19-year-old center Macklin Celebrini, grand prize of the 2024 draft lottery, has launched himself into the mesosphere after a very good rookie campaign last season. Not only does he sit second on the league assist leaderboard and tied for sixth on the goals list, but he's also made a habit of creating jaw-dropping highlights that on their own make the Sharks a worthy watch for a neutral fan. On Wednesday, he was the driving force that earned San Jose a pair of points on the road against their in-state rivals.
The L.A. Kings, current owners of the seventh-best record in the Western Conference, are slogging through a season as one of the league's least-dynamic offenses but have nevertheless racked up enough points to sit above the cut-off line. This contest against the Sharks started very slow, but it was 3-2 Kings after L.A. scored a late go-ahead goal in the third. The Sharks were forced to call goaltender Yaroslav Askarov to the bench for the extra attacker, and Celebrini made his mark.
2026-01-09 01:25:28
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
I did not write about it when it happened, but last year there was a bit of a manufactured crisis in rap about the fact that no real rap song had made the Billboard Top 40 for the first time since 1990. The whole topic felt forced, like when ESPN comes up with ridiculously specific stats to fit whatever narrative they want to sell during that particular segment. Rap started as an outsider's genre, so it sounds like a good thing to me to not be a part of Top 40. There's also the fact that most of the biggest pop stars in rap had not dropped much that year: no Drake, no Kendrick, no Travis Scott. And if you look a little below the Top 40, you'll find Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, and NBA Youngboy. It's really not that big of a deal.
