2025-11-08 00:41:32
As the parent of an eighteen-month-old, I’ve been reading a lot lately. That is, if your definition of reading includes thumbing through sheets of increasingly careworn and spittlesoaked cardboard, reciting the 30 or 40 words that compose each tale from memory, and pausing innumerable times to acknowledge any shape that may evoke the holiest of trinities: ball, bug, star.
At first—when I had a mere ten months of experience in this arena—I believed that reading to my child would be straightforward, if a little repetitive. I thought boredom would be the biggest obstacle. Little did I realize I would be jeopardizing my own sanity, because the more time you spend with these texts, the more you feel drawn into their deep wells of chaos. They may help my kid gently drift off, but the confounding logic I encounter in these books keeps me up at night. Let me initiate you into some of the mysteries that have come to plague me.
2025-11-07 23:45:29
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.
Israel: We got our first edition of the college football playoff standings and hoo boy, it’s time to get MAD ONLINE. The main takeaways from the first bracket are that the SEC and the Big Ten are swallowing up all the real estate, the Big 12 makes a decent show of it, and literally no one has any respect for the ACC, which is a huge blow to Miami’s chances.
2025-11-07 23:22:15
While the man inarguably does his research, we must assume that Al Michaels did not read this story when it ran two and a half weeks ago. If he had, he would have called in sick for Thursday night's Raiders-Broncos game, and so might have spared himself having to call one of the worst events ever presented by upright mammals. And when we say "events," we mean "things watched by other people"—sporting contests, sure, but also television, movies, films, concerts, art exhibits, circuses, operas, mime, busking on the boardwalk, all the way down to battlefield operating theaters. Think of the worst karaoke rendition you have ever heard, only with some helium-huffing involved. Think of Civil War-era trauma medicine. It was worse than that.
Because Michaels is a professional, his preparation for a game likely does not include painfully accurate blogs roasting the Raiders on a worker-owned sports website. But it's hard to think of anything that might better have prepared him for Thursday's 10-7 Broncos unloss (to call it a win is far too generous) over the Raiders; it was a game so dire that it moved Comrade Anantharaman's pungent analysis of a previous brutal Raiders game from "well-aimed snark" to "unsettling prescience." Thursday's game was so unspeakably wretched on both sides that we left thinking that we might have been guilty of both eviscerating the Raiders too soon, and ignoring the Broncos' rich fraudulence too long. Put another way, when our decorated comrade wrote about a Raiders loss in which they gained 95 total yards and lost 31-0, she got the better game.
2025-11-07 22:58:31
Earlier this summer, ESPN made the confounding and ultimately disastrous choice to build its NBA Finals broadcasts around the stentorian yowling of Stephen A. Smith, a man who neither knows ball nor cares for it. You could have deduced that from watching him work the desk or, even more starkly, plug away at a solitaire app on his phone during the best game of the series. One might consider Smith's omnipresence on ESPN's broadcast alongside his naked disinterest in the thing being broadcast, and wonder whether this was as cynical as he could get.
No. It could get worse, as shown by this grotesque new AI ad Smith cut for Solitaire Cash, a solitaire-branded app that belongs as a notable new entry in mobile game hell:
2025-11-07 22:01:12
I'm writing specifically about the Edmonton Oilers at the St. Louis Blues on Sportsnet on Monday night, but in broad strokes that will apply to any game you're watching.
First Period
2025-11-07 04:52:37
When Zohran Mamdani upset Andrew Cuomo to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, it led to a lot of histrionics. The usual fear tactics against a young Muslim democratic socialist had failed to torpedo his campaign, and the rich were getting desperate. In Cuomo's case, he ignored the public rejection, ran as an independent candidate, and doubled down on the bigotry. In other cases, there was panicked discussion among the wealthy about the horrific possibility of having to pay a little more in taxes.
This summer, the hottest trend among the elites was making threats to leave New York City. Those with houses in the Hamptons were in a tizzy. Realtors claimed to be flooded with calls from wealthy clients who wanted to flee; landlords were freaking out about Mamdani's promise to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments. There was plenty of bluster about relocating businesses or completely departing the city to thwart Mamdani's plans. In most cases, because of who was making the threat, it inadvertently served as yet another reason to vote for him.
