2025-11-19 03:19:39
This week on Nothing But Respect we were joined by the boys from You Know Ball for a special home-and-home podcast series. Part 1, which you can find below, was in theory dedicated to the question of which teams this season are cool. I say "in theory" because we had to first get through an extended Luka Garza segment, a lengthy appreciation of Tyrese Maxey and V.J. "MJ Edgecombe" Edgecombe, and a brief look at the dire state of the New Orleans Pelicans. We then had a discussion around my admittedly vague prompt to name some cool teams as to how to even define that term in the first place. It was a fun one.
Harry and I will be recording Part 2 later this afternoon, where we will be discussing the obverse of this episode's question and conducting a survey of the teams with the worst vibes.
2025-11-19 02:48:46
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about eating with your mouth open, Epstein fuckery, extended TV title sequences, and more.
Your letters:
2025-11-19 02:02:29
We first meet Izzy Gently, the protagonist of Joshua Wheeler’s captivating debut novel, The High Heaven, as a child. She is alone, wounded, and wandering. The year is 1967, and disaster has befallen the doomsday cult in which she’s grown up after the local Sheriff’s office raided their compound, discovering a dead body and a landing strip with a sign welcoming extraterrestrial visitors. Rumors had long circulated among residents of Alamogordo, New Mexico, about what was going on at the farm in nearby La Luz, but nothing like this had ever happened.
The first person Izzy comes across is Oliver Gently, a local rancher who, along with his wife, Maude, treats her wound and takes her in. Wheeler himself is an Alamogordo native back seven generations, which he writes about at length in his 2018 essay collection, Acid West. Even as Wheeler makes pains through an author’s note to establish the fictitious nature of the characters and locations featured in the novel, his love and care for the place, and his feelings about what has been done to it, shine through in the quality of his attention to it.
2025-11-19 01:38:07
Lance Armstrong is a name synonymous with cheating. The brash Texan stole American hearts by winning seven consecutive Tours de France beginning in 1999, only to break them all a few years later by confessing to doping and having all seven titles stripped. Those are the broad outlines of the story anyway, though the particulars are quite a bit more complicated.
Armstrong is perhaps the ideal subject through which to understand the theory and practice of doping. He had a good career on the bike before he was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer, only for the sport to rapidly enter its erythropoietin, or EPO, era while he was away undergoing treatment. Armstrong's innovation was to streamline and professionalize a team-wide EPO operation, all while maintaining an outspoken public persona and loudly proclaiming his innocence. His saga unintentionally raises some interesting questions about cleanness, dirtiness, and how those terms are contested, because the Lance Armstrong story is a story about an almost undefinable ideal: the natural body.
2025-11-19 01:14:10
This late stage of Alexander Ovechkin's NHL career has been a lesson in conservation. As Ovi skates through his first season since turning 40, comfortable in his reign as the league's all-time king of goals, his play feels like it's taken on a certain regal quality. He is grizzled, venerable, and so obviously distinguished from all the other men around him—even when he's not actually doing all that much. And when he makes a statement on the ice, as he's done with goals in his last two outings, it always feels like a special event.
Many parts of Ovechkin's game have fallen away with age. Last season, discounting the abridged 2021 campaign, he set new career lows in blocked shots, hits, and takeaways, as well as average time on ice per game. His broken fibula was also a rare knock for a guy who'd played so indestructibly for so long. But Ovechkin didn't crawl across the finish line in his chase to Wayne Gretzky's 894 goals; he zoomed into uncharted territory. A 44-goal year, tied for third in the NHL, allowed him to arrive at the mark well ahead of schedule. (Heading into last season, I think most assumed he'd be getting there right about now.) And even though you could watch him and process, intellectually, all the things that he wasn't doing out on the ice, the number 44 and the number 895 superseded everything. Ovechkin was still better than almost anyone at putting the puck in the net.
2025-11-19 00:44:18
Down 15 points in the fourth quarter, deep in their own territory, facing first-and-11 after a false start penalty, the Las Vegas Raiders ran a plunge into the line. It went worse than you might expect.
It is worth pausing here to mention that the Dallas Cowboys are a joke. This once-proud franchise, winners of five Super Bowls, is now known for loud and expensive mediocrity even in years when they manage to win a playoff game. They have not won consecutive playoff games in 30 years, and two years ago their season ended on one of the funniest plays of all time. On Monday night, they led the Raiders 31-9 going into the fourth quarter. If there were any NFC East team that could blow that lead… well, it’d be the Giants. But the Cowboys are a close second.
