2026-01-23 05:10:01
It's not great, if I'm being honest. From amending my answer to the question "How ya doing, Roth" at the very beginning of this week's episode of The Distraction, it is clear that things are not going great. But for the second straight week, we found a way to split our episode between the Not Great stuff and being stupid about sports, with the result being one of the most enjoyable hours of my week. I'm not saying we've solved anything—honestly, if I thought we had solved something through our goofy podcast, I'd be kind of worried—but we've at least figured out a balance that works.
Of course, it helps when the guest is Patrick Wyman, America's largest historian, author of the upcoming book Lost Worlds, and a great podcaster in his own right. I've sought out his perspective on both the present and the past for years, and we got a decent dose of both in this episode. We spoke about the corrosive effect of sustained exposure to bad vibes, and the run-in with an unnamed former MLB player at an Arizona youth soccer game that inspired Patrick to purchase a heavy bag, but we also talked about history stuff. This meant trying to understand our current moment of national crisis in the context of the country's fractious and generally insane history, and examining the sclerotic empire we're in and what does and doesn't work about it; I misattributed an insight from one friend to another here, but the conversation didn't really suffer for it. And then, after a discussion of the country's competing layers of authority—and how fragile and contingent their relationship and everything that followed from them always was—we turned to Pete Hegseth's impossibly shitty kettlebell swings.
2026-01-23 04:20:53
On Tuesday, some number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents camped out near Liam Conejo Ramos's home in the Twin Cities suburb of Columbia Heights and waited for him to return with his father, so they could ambush them. According to news reports, agents grabbed Liam out of a car that was still running in the driveway, with one agent leading him to the door of his house in an effort to draw out any other family members at home. ICE then took Liam and his father into custody; their lawyers believe they are now likely being detained in Texas.
Liam is 5 years old. He was on his way home from pre-kindergarten, where he was doing all the things that other 5-year-olds do, like learning how to trace letters and learn words. A group of grown men in tactical gear, working under the auspices of the federal government, bum-rushed a kid in a bunny hat with a Spider-Man backpack on his way home from doing those things and then tried to use him as bait in the president's ongoing siege against the country he leads. Once again, the Department of Homeland Security deployed lies to justify its actions:
ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED. On January 20, ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias an illegal alien from Ecuador who was RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration. As agents approached the driver Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, fled on foot—abandoning his child. For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.
2026-01-23 04:02:18
My favorite goal that I've ever seen live: Jan. 4, 2019, the woeful Detroit Red Wings hosting a really good Nashville Predators squad. The Wings went into it having lost 10 of their last 11, and they started the game by surrendering the first two goals. But from 0-2 down, they put together an unexpected comeback, first with a speedster highlight from Andreas Athanasiou, then scores from Thomas Vanek and Tyler Bertuzzi. The Preds tied the game up late in the third, forcing overtime, and just when it looked like we were headed for a shootout, the team's beloved leader—though not yet captain—settled things himself. Dylan Larkin deked out one Nashvillain at the top of the offensive zone, curved away from another, and then flipped a backhander past a couple more bodies and into the net. I think of this goal often to remind myself that, no matter how a season's gone in the weeks or months before, it's always worth going to a rink and screaming for the home team. Every game has the potential to make you very, very glad you went.
Now an 11-year vet, the 29-year-old Larkin has only become more enmeshed in the hearts of Red Wings fans, even as the franchise itself has stayed stuck in neutral. In 2015–16, he led the Wings in scoring as a rookie before they stalled out in a five-game first-round series against the Lightning. Since then, every other player on the roster has moved on, and the Red Wings haven't made a single playoff appearance.
2026-01-23 03:50:12
Every so often, an obvious talent will suddenly appear from nowhere. The initial instinct, among critics, is to indicate this event as an event via a rush of comparisons. One such case was that of Elisa Shua Dusapin, 24 at the time of her debut novel, and 29 when her work reached English-speaking audiences. Dusapin was immediately inducted into a number of artistic lineages that all forecast some future importance. Dusapin writes a distinct type of novel—roughly 150 pages of sparse and haunted prose—that netted her comparisons to interdisciplinary titan Marguerite Duras; perennial Booker Prize competitors including Michael Ondaatje, Deborah Levy, Elena Ferrante; and a note from the publisher evoking Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. International praise evokes all-timers the likes of Henry James, and Anton Chekhov. Dusapin traverses the same banal dreamscapes made famous by filmmakers like David Lynch or Yorgos Lanthimos (in their less hostile moments), where everything seems perceptibly wrong. Dusapin is also a truly international writer, born in France, and raised between Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland, she currently lives in Jordan’s capital city, Amman. Her books have now been translated into 35 languages, and she won the 2021 National Book Award for translated literature. The forecasting was correct, and she really does have a gift.
Like the international cities she has called home, each of Dusapin’s novels is distinct, but united by her astonishing, borderline-generational talent for mood and atmosphere. The range of emotion is extensive, from the thrumming disquiet of her breakout debut, Winter in Sokcho, to the minor-key sadness of The Pachinko Parlor, to the simmering tenderness of Vladivostok Circus.
These three novels form a sort of unofficial trilogy, all appearing in excellent translations from the original French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, and were published by Rochester-based press, Open Letter. The Old Fire, Dusapin’s fourth novel, reaches a sort of synthesis of the three prevailing moods that have appeared in her novels thus far.
2026-01-23 02:59:53
In California, a proposed law drafted by organized labor would impose a one-time tax on all the state's billionaires, equal to some portion of their total worth. Those whose net worth exceeds $1.1 billion would pay around five percent; five percent of $1.1 billion is $55 million, which would leave those Californians with a mere $1.045 billion in personal net worth. Those whose net worths fall between $1 billion and $1.1 billion would pay a lesser percentage of their wealth.
The proposal is called the "2026 Billionaire Tax Act," and while it could potentially generate some gigantic sum of money for the state of California, anyone capable of some basic math, and of even vaguely conceiving of how much money a billion dollars is, can see that it would not meaningfully deplete even those paupers whose personal net worth sits at a mere $1 billion. Those affected by the tax would be able to spread their payment over five years, beginning in 2027, in case any of these individuals whose personal wealth exceeds that of some island nations find themselves illiquid at the moment.
Among the proposal's opponents—including, of course, many billionaires, who reportedly have already begun planning their exits from the state in anticipation of a tax that may very well never come to pass—is California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has boasted of working against its passage behind the scenes, and has promised to defeat the initiative should it ever reach his desk, where he could bring its passage into law to an end simply by refusing to sign it. (He can be bypassed in theory by putting the proposal to voters as a direct ballot initiative.) The Democrat, widely understood to have his sights set on the party's 2028 presidential nomination, has fought off taxes on extreme wealth at least twice before in his term, despite their strong popularity among residents of the state.
2026-01-23 02:16:12
Two noteworthy developments in British entertainment were announced yesterday. One was about a much-discussed cooking show, and the other about a much-discussed soccer team, and so by definition infinitely more tedious.
The cooking show is The Great British Bake Off, the much-imitated and semi-duplicated staple of oven-based society, which has aficionados everywhere and remains a chief repository of Defector's very limited supply of admiration. There, the venerable Prue Leith, who replaced the equally venerable Mary Berry as the charming counterpoint to Paul Hollywood (real name: Paul Hollywood), announced that she would be leaving the show for its 17th series; her replacement would be another maven of televised British cuisine, Nigella Lawson. People who eat better than us swear by Lawson and her sometime wink-wink-nudge-nudge descriptions of the ingredients and their preparation, so well done to them. At least our own kitchen help thinks so, and who are we to question their views, especially when they could put ground glass in the company-picnic burger meat and we would never know?
It is more difficult to stomach Manchester United's plan for, and this is The Athletic's description, "a dramatised retelling of the club’s history ... similar in style to The Crown." Good lord. Can we get a window-quality slider, double-paned with cheese, please?
