2025-11-20 04:38:11
On Tuesday night, Deandre Ayton received his second-ever alley-oop from LeBron James. The first, Ayton said in press after the Lakers' 140-126 win over the Utah Jazz, occurred when he was in eighth grade, at James's youth camp in Las Vegas. "He was court-hopping, playing with the campers," the 27-year-old big man remembered. "The one play, him in the drill with me, he threw the alley-oop and I finished it. I couldn't believe he threw it. Here I am again: I can't believe he threw the lob."
James made his season debut on Tuesday after missing the Lakers' first 14 games with sciatica. To contextualize just how unusual that was, the 40-year-old James shared some of his own childhood memories: "This is the first time I've started a basketball season and not played since I've started playing basketball, like 9 years old." Last week, he spent a few practices with the team's G-League affiliate while the Lakers were on the road. After getting through back-to-back practices pain-free, James returned to his actual team's practice on Monday and introduced himself as a "new player." After that Monday practice, he said his lungs felt like those of a "newborn baby," and he administered himself "tea and rest." Regardless, he was cleared to begin season 23.
For basketball fans who have grown up with LeBron James—a huge chunk of NBA viewership, at this point—those opening minutes of the season might have offered an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality. He went 11 minutes into the game without scoring. It wasn't until halfway through the second quarter that he attempted a two-point field goal; he only hit one four minutes into the third quarter. Were you fidgeting on the sofa and researching a life insurance policy? "As the game went on, my wind got a lot better. Caught my second wind, caught my third wind," James said afterward. Maybe it was on that third wind that he began to cook.
2025-11-20 03:25:49
As of publication, residents of San Francisco's District 4, comprising most of the Sunset from 7th Avenue out to the Pacific Ocean, do not have a representative on the city's Board of Supervisors; the 29-year-old former pet shop owner whom the mayor appointed to the position had to resign after around a week on the job. The cascading series of reasons is both very funny and a revealing look at the strange state of San Francisco local politics.
The story of District 4 (where I lived for the better part of six years) begins, as most stories of latter-day culture and politics do, in 2020. San Francisco was as reshaped by the pandemic and its aftereffects as any American city besides Minneapolis. The city's tech-heavy workforce stayed home in larger numbers than anywhere else in the nation, only for the titans of big tech's second wave to conduct mass layoffs. The Bay Area's staggering income inequality widened in the years after 2020, which was of far less concern to those in power (read: rich people) than the uptick in crime—or, more precisely, the uptick of the visibility of crime—in the center of San Francisco.
2025-11-20 03:02:20
Coach John Beam's murder has been a national story, which seems like something that John Beam would find simultaneously hilarious and troublesome. His adult life was dedicated to teaching, and to comforting and confronting students and athletes for three decades at various public institutions serving the communities in Oakland from which those students and players came. It was an often thankless gig, as too many teaching jobs are, and yet not without its rewards. His work made him a local icon and little more, but once the descriptor "star on Netflix documentary" was affixed to all that hard and humble work, thanks to Beam's role in the streamer's documentary series Last Chance U, it was enough to make him posthumously viral.
His life's work as a teacher, coach, and athletic director in the heart of Oakland was the stuff of legend, starting with his work at Skyline High School in the foothills above town nearly forty years ago. Beam was the football coach, athletic director, confessor, ancillary parent, guidance counselor, and general beacon about town, a burly and empathetic presence who dealt with Oakland's kids in the world they inhabited rather than the more lurid and simpler version that exists in the public imagination. He first came to public notice as a side player and de facto hero in the background in Tim Keown's book Skyline, which was actually about the Skyline basketball team but referenced Beam and his influence repeatedly. That book is more than three decades old.
2025-11-20 02:42:14
Entering Tuesday's final World Cup qualifier, Scotland was desperate for a win. Though even a loss would have kept Scottish hope alive via a possible playoff, a win would guarantee that Scotland would be making its return to the World Cup for the first time since 1998. (Big week for the not-since-98ers, it seems.) Tuesday's showdown in Glasgow against Denmark, the group leaders heading in, was essentially a playoff-to-avoid-the-playoff, and it delivered on the excitement implied by those stakes. Thanks to a late Kiernan Tierney winner, and a Kenny McLean exclamation point, Scotland survived 90-plus grueling and dramatic minutes to win 4-2 and book its ticket for the tournament next summer.
2025-11-20 02:23:22
The eyes got me. Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger isn't the brightest, or the largest painting in its room—it might be the smallest—but it's easily the most striking. It called to me from the next room over at the Frick Collection in New York, where it's hung since that tasteful robber baron purchased it in 1912. Here is something that speaks to me in that insistent way that few paintings have.
More is a man of middle age, sitting in three-quarters profile, staring intently off to our right. He is surrounded in earth tones, red velvet and black satin in front of green drapery. He clutches a book and wears a wedding ring, signs of his intellectual and domestic life. There are things that would draw the eye in a lesser work: Jonathan Lethem said, of the effect Holbein is able to pull off depicting that velvet, "that sleeve should be illegal." But it's the eyes that dominate. Of a rich grey that somehow resists being umbral, they are set in a lightly lined face that speaks to challenges met and still to come. If I knew nothing of Thomas More the person, I would see someone prepared to face an uncertain future.
2025-11-20 00:39:20
As I finally got to work on writing Defector’s fifth Annual Report, I found myself noodling on some broader thoughts about the worker-owned media landscape. Tom said some sections would work as a standalone blog, and who am I to disagree with Defector’s Editor-in-Chief? You can find the full version of the Year 5 Annual…
