I love Superman. He was originally conceived as a vagrant corrupted by ultimate power in a short story by Jerry Siegel called “The Reign of the Superman.” Siegel was scared of girls and introverted with other boys, too. He didn’t do well in school. His buddy  ( 3 min )

The hunger Well we just got back from stringing up our weakest friend in the middle of the town square for the vampires to feast on overnight. No one liked the doing of it when it came to actually doing it I’ll admit that. But the past is  ( 2 min )

Without Paige Bueckers, the Dallas Wings look like what they were last year, when they were also without Paige Bueckers, which was a very bad basketball team. So bad, in fact, that they landed in the lottery and got to draft Paige Bueckers. The first-overall pick has missed her team’s last two games under concussion protocol; she banged heads with Courtney Vandersloot in a Wings-Sky game last week and complained of a headache the next day. The team says she will be re-evaluated this week. The step after drafting a franchise player is to figure out who else should stick around, and that must be done in Bueckers’s absence. It is unpleasant work. On Tuesday against the Storm in Seattle, the Wings revealed the answer to be “basically no one.” They fell to a league-worst 1-7 on the season in a game they led by 11 in the third quarter. On the strength of their gang rebounding in the first half, the Wings put up some 20 more shots than the Storm, though this did much more for the denominator than for the numerator in the end. Final line: 30-for-86.  ( 25 min )

Members of the Defector staff often send each other animal photos and videos. Some are cute, or doing funny things; others are abominations (mostly Instagram Chihuahuas that Samer has found). Often a theme will be enforced: For example, today we are celebrating Wet Beast Wednesday. A thing immediately noticeable, if one were to observe and track these exchanges over a length of time, is that the viral animal trafficking is much heavier on slow news days, because we are bored. Today, we sunk so low as to share this guy: https://twitter.com/imagesaicouldnt/status/1930011609914568969  ( 26 min )

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best design advice column. Everyone’s saying this! Here are this month’s dilemmas: Dave asks:  ( 32 min )

For the second straight year, the Florida Panthers are playing the Edmonton Oilers for the Stanley Cup. I'm not convinced that we can see their futures by looking at their pasts, but I think it's worthwhile to refresh ourselves on how we got here, and why this will be the rare Cup matchup that comes with a history. Who are these guys?  ( 27 min )

You, the savvy baseball fan, are almost certainly wise to imagine what Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes will look like someday wearing some other team's uniform. If you are a fan of one of six particular franchises, you might even sensibly dare to imagine what Skenes might look like wearing your team's uniform. The odds are heavily against Skenes playing the back half of his career in Pittsburgh. For one thing, top-end starters tend to change teams, and tend especially to flow away from broke-dick bozo outfits like the one in Pittsburgh and in the direction of, you know, serious professional organizations. For another, the Pirates in particular don't generally hold onto their real-deal pitchers. The last pitcher to make it to 150 starts with Pittsburgh was Paul Maholm, a guy I almost remember, and who last toed the rubber for the Pirates in 2011. Maholm is one of only two pitchers to cross that threshold for the franchise since 1993. By way of comparison, the Colorado Rockies, whose pitchers are sandbagged by the worst possible environmental conditions, have had seven 150-start fellas over that span. I am not here to say that the Rockies are doing anything right, because they super-duper are not—for all I know the team is in its present horrific state as divine punishment for the crime of having given 206 starts to Aaron Cook—only to point out that the last starter to go eight seasons in Pittsburgh was born before the invention of the compact disc. Relatedly, Mitch Keller, currently in his seventh season in Pittsburgh and climbing toward 150 career starts, has a couple seasons left on an extension signed in 2024, and is about to be traded as hell.  ( 29 min )

It probably does not matter who occupies the position of hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies. For the previous three seasons, the job belonged to Hensley Meulens, and his only notable contribution to the franchise's history was illegally clambering into the cockpit of a 757 while it was in flight. Meulens was fired in April, when the Rockies' offense was the worst in the league, and replaced by former Rockies head coach Clint Hurdle. A few weeks later, he was bumped up to bench coach and two more guys, Jordan Pacheco and Nic Wilson, were named co-hitting coaches. The Rockies' offense is still the worst in the league. That shouldn't really bother anyone. I mean, yes, it is a symptom of the larger disease plaguing the Rockies that they didn't fire Meulens in the offseason and give themselves time to bring in a new hitting coach with fresh ideas, but instead panic-fired him in April and then handed the job to a well-past-it former manager who has been enjoying various make-work jobs in the organization since 2019, and then split the job among two new bozos. But like I said, the roster is garbage and no amount of emphasis on the players' two-strike approach is going to make much of a difference.  ( 24 min )

This week’s story presents us all with a bouquet of ethical questions. How much unpaid labor would you take on for a dear friend? Nude yoga in the yard: Yea or nay? Under what circumstances can you instruct people to call you “uncle”?  In the face of such quandaries, we had no choice but to call in Defector’s own Brandy Jensen to be the guest. We wanted to put Brandy’s devotion to an annoying world to the test. Did we break her? You’ll have to listen to find out.  ( 21 min )

This spring, a new business opened on the main drag of my West Philadelphia neighborhood, provoking both excitement and trepidation. “I saw it just the other day and feared it,” one friend texted. “Like what the actual fuck is that shit,” said another. “Why?!!!” said a third. “Who is that for?”  ( 69 min )

The list of laws Musk may have broken over the past few months is lengthy.  ( 3 min )

The latest episode of the MLB Trade Rumors Podcast is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts! Make sure you subscribe as well! You can also use the player at this link to listen, if you don’t use Spotify or Apple for podcasts. This week, host Darragh McDonald is joined by Steve Adams of…  ( 13 min )

Taking the leap (or not) with Trevor Alixopulos; Miles Klee’s radio investigation of the national mood  ( 1 min )

a fiery writer-owned cooperative  ( 1 min )

a fiery writer-owned cooperative  ( 1 min )

A word game just for FLAMING HYDRA subscribers. RULES Please create an ENTERTAINING and APT acronym from the letters provided. Use only the initial letters—use all of them, and in the order shown. If there is a theme specified, your HYDRANYM should refer to it in some way.  ( 2 min )

Motherfucking Owen got me so good. Remember the intern intro blog last year where Owen made a goofy little remark about there being a Fibonacci sequence of Defector interns? I took this as a joke, obviously, because as he established, this would get out of hand very quickly. But I remembered it. A year later, […]  ( 25 min )

Viewed from one angle, Tom Thibodeau losing his job as head coach of the New York Knicks, a development reported this afternoon by Shams Charania, appears deeply unfair. Here's a guy who led his team to a 51-win regular season, a trip to the Eastern Conference final—kicking the beans out of the hated Boston Celtics along the way—and got two wins away from the NBA Finals, and is now jobless. If you were fired under similar conditions, you would probably feel pretty hard done by. But the true states of a basketball team and its head coach's suitability for employment are never quite as simple as the macro conditions might make them seem. Before the playoffs began, the Knicks were marked as a particularly underwhelming three-seed. Their net rating was plus-4.3, they had very few impressive wins against good teams, and Thibodeau was once again burying his starters under a mountain of needless minutes. Whatever shine the playoff results themselves had restored could be easily tarnished by some of the underlying facts: The Knicks went 10-8 in the playoffs with a point differential of exactly 0, and the starting five that Thibs leaned on so heavily in the regular season was so bad—minus-31 in 335 minutes—that Mitchell Robinson was inserted into the starting lineup partway through the conference final.  ( 24 min )

LAS VEGAS — "We often talk about baseball games as a metric for where we are, and we're literally in the first inning," one of the Winklevoss twins gloats. "And this game's going to overtime." It's the first day of Bitcoin 2025, industry day here at the largest cryptocurrency conference in the world. This Winklevoss is sharing the stage with the other one, plus Donald Trump's newly appointed crypto and AI czar David Sacks. They are in the midst of a victory lap, laughing with the free ease of men who know they have it made. The mangled baseball metaphor neither lands nor elicits laughs, but that's fine. He's earned, or at any rate acquired, the right to be wrong.  ( 72 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about bacon, the NBA Finals, graphology, and more. Will:  ( 58 min )

It’s 1994. Nike, whose golden goose has put down the basketball and picked up the baseball bat, is trying to figure out what to do with one of the brightest young talents in the NBA. His name is Penny Hardaway. His game is silky smooth, his shot is effortless, and he glides through defenses like Houdini. He’s a good-looking kid, tall but not gangly, with a cool haircut and a great smile. He plays alongside of one of the league’s newest larger-than-life characters, Shaquille O’Neal. By most metrics, he looks to be the perfect spokesman, but there’s one major problem: he’s very shy. Not flashy, not over-the-top. A showman on the court but nowhere else. Nike, though, has an idea: instead of forcing him to be more outspoken, what if he had a personal spokesman of sorts? Another version of himself that could embody the personality and flair his game has but the man lacks? "They said, 'since you’re so quiet and reserved and laid-back, wouldn’t it be great to give you an alter ego?'" Hardaway recalled about his conversations with Nike over the direction of their marketing campaign. "We called the alter ego Lil Penny and I loved it right away, because somebody would be talking trash for me. I thought that was pretty cool."  ( 33 min )

PHILADELPHIA — The Benham Brothers think they are very funny and very smart. They are 50-year-old tall, blonde, identical twins who have a series of scripted jokes that mostly amount to calling each other stupid and effeminate. They are not pastors, which is maybe why they are so bad at reading the Bible. I know because I watched them try this weekend. The Benham Brothers were the second speakers to go on stage this weekend at a Christian wealth conference called Life Surge. The event was held at the Wells Fargo Center from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., and it featured speakers like former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Cooper DeJean, Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni, and Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley. I went because I wanted to know what exactly a bunch of Eagles were endorsing with their presence.  ( 38 min )

Last summer I attended Rare Book School at Princeton, which is about the tweediest thing a person can do. One humid day, after a morning spent squinting at Gutenberg Bibles, I sipped a coffee with Amy Dawson, a lifelong librarian and cataloguer with decades of experience in rare books. Dawson has a careful, thoughtful demeanor, shoulder-length blonde curly hair, and a quick laugh. She also moonlights as a library consultant for the Rowfant Club, a rare books club for men in Cleveland, founded in 1892. Women may visit the club as guests, work in its library, or attend its lectures on Wednesday evenings and Friday lunchtime—but cannot become members. I was immediately intrigued.  I have an attraction-repulsion thing for men’s-only institutions. I attended Bowdoin College, a school that didn’t go fully co-ed until 1971. Now I collect books about my alma mater written before 1950, when I would not have been allowed to attend. In my early 20s, I briefly worked as a personal assistant for a nonagenarian retired banker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was lovely, tipped generously, and liked his sheets ironed every day. When I wasn’t ordering him corduroy pants, I would make his dinner reservations at the Union Club, where only men can become members. The policy annoyed him, because he was looking for a girlfriend.  ( 42 min )

Drifting somewhere on the resignation to despair spectrum.  ( 36 min )

I am a bit sleep deprived on my first day of work. I certainly could have slept last night—my excitement for the dream of interning here was outweighed by Amtrak-induced exhaustion. But unfortunately for me, Oregon State was doing something to USC on a baseball field. It wasn't exactly baseball, not as you and I know it. What it was ... well ... maybe you can tell me. It would have been OSU's two consecutive squeeze plays, which made three consecutive bunts of what would be four bunts in the second inning—that was when I knew that I would have no escape to unconsciousness.  ( 25 min )

Spend enough time watching the best chess players in the world play, and even a chess amateur will pick up on something: Space is at such a premium in their games that any seemingly innocent, sensible move—sliding the A-pawn to the third rank to prevent the dark-square bishop from forcing check, burning a tempo to line your rook up with the opposing queen even though four pieces separate them—can be punished several moves down the line. The greats can project themselves forward in time and see weaknesses before they even begin to develop. That is not what happened on Sunday when Magnus Carlsen lost to current world champion Gukesh Dommaraju. The former world champion played very relatable chess, by which I mean he committed an unspeakable blunder to lose from a winning position and then pounded the table in disgust.  ( 23 min )

Here’s a story in two parts, both of which will be crushingly familiar to you. The main character of our tale is Iowa (uh oh) Senator Joni Ernst, who held a town hall in her home state this past Friday. Ernst’s constituents at that town hall were vocally angry about President Trump’s massive tax bill, which passed in the House a month ago and threatens to cut half a trillion dollars in funding to Medicaid. People will die if this bill passes in Ernst’s chamber. When one audience member informed the Senator of this fact, she responded, with supreme Midwestern condescension, “Well, we’re all going to die.” That’s the first part of our story. The second part is Ernst’s formal response to the heckling, which she recorded on her phone while walking around a graveyard. Take it away, womanboss.  ( 26 min )

The Kansas City Royals advised minor-leaguer Jac Caglianone, their first pick in the 2024 draft and top overall prospect, that he could accelerate his path to the majors by focusing his development on mastery of the art of socking huge dingers. I realize that this is pretty much exactly what every organization is saying to every player in the minors at every opportunity. I realize, too, that this is what the sport itself is communicating to everyone, everywhere, all the time: If you would like to play baseball in the majors, the surest way is by learning to wham the ball over that wall. Caglianone's case is special. For one thing, the Royals have a profound need in their lineup for someone even remotely dingerish. As of Monday morning, Kansas City's puny hitters have combined to sock just 34 homers in 60 games, by a hideous margin the fewest in the majors, and just more than a third as many as have been whammo'd by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Cal Raleigh, mighty sockdolaging catcher for the Seattle Mariners, has already clobbered 23. It's not by design. "There are too many good players in that room," said frustrated manager Matt Quatraro, way back in April, after his team was shut down by Max Fried of the New York Yankees. "It's part of baseball. They have to keep their heads up and keep going."  ( 30 min )

By sheer power of will, determination, and lots and lots and lots of money, FIFA is looking to turn the previously irrelevant Club World Cup into a quadrennial summer-time blockbuster. Traditionally, the event has been a global supercup of sorts, each year pitting the seven winners of FIFA's seven federations' continental tournaments against each other in a brief, midseason contest that virtually nobody really cared about. This month will bring the inaugural edition of the new-look CWC, a 32-team behemoth that will cram an already over-stuffed soccer calendar with yet another competition that nobody asked for. It will take a lot of work to make this tournament into something fans care about. For the players and clubs involved, however, there are hundreds of millions of reasons why they're willing to cut into their already vanishingly small rest and recovery time to try their damnedest to win. In its effort to make this whole thing matter, FIFA has filled the prize pool with ungodly sums of money, enticing participants with lucrative payouts that can rise up to $125 million for the winners. That's almost one Florian Wirtz, if reports are to be believed, which should ensure that clubs like Real Madrid—who just paid Liverpool €10 million to sign Trent Alexander-Arnold early enough for him to play in the group stage of the CWC—and freshly crowned Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain will provide a good showing.  ( 28 min )

I thought the game I attended last Tuesday was just about the smoothest basketball any team could play, when the reigning champion New York Liberty jumped out to a 22-3 lead on the Golden State Valkyries and cruised to a 95-67 victory. But I was embarrassingly, humiliatingly wrong, because I had no idea how much the Libs would step it up for Ellie The Elephant's birthday on Sunday. For this special occasion, which was marked by the presence of mascots from all over the area, the Libs improved to 7-0 with a 100-52 demolition job on the Connecticut Sun. Because New York took the fourth quarter off, that final score makes the game look even closer than it really was. The Liberty have been gifted a pretty chill schedule to start their title defense, and the Sun—certainly in retrospect—were the plumpest creampuff of them all. A dangerous team that gave the Lynx all they could handle in the semis last season, this year's model lost basically everyone that mattered as the franchise explores a possible sale and relocation. The Liberty, on the other hand, only look better. Natasha Cloud has been an instant sparkplug and fan favorite at point guard; last week she took a bow for the crowd during a timeout after the video board showed her besting Breanna Stewart in a chopsticks-using competition. The return of creative sharpshooter Marine Johannès after a year away means more deadly spacing. Kennedy Burke, a bit player last year, has evolved into a versatile spot-filler who's hit as many threes as anyone not named Sabrina Ionescu. Jonquel Jones is averaging a double-double for the first time since her MVP year in 2021.  ( 24 min )

Block off some time for our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Mat Holmes and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Mat lives in Maine with his amazing wife, Hazel. He is a part-time volleyball coach, thrilled to be making his Defector debut with this puzzle. He is a lucky guy with two strong daughters, fun friends, several motivated students, and a kick-ass trivia squad (shoutout to Gloria!) Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.  ( 19 min )

MLB's replay era has brought many annoying developments to the game, perhaps none more so than infielders keeping their glove pinned to every baserunner in their vicinity, knowing there's a chance that an infinitesimal separation between foot/hand and base can lead to an out. It is effective, but the behavior is also vaguely narc-ish. It's how a nerd records an out. On Sunday, the Toronto Blue Jays prevailed over the West Sacramento A's, 8–4, which is good news for the Blue Jays but even better news for George Springer, who in the fifth inning was the victim of some zealous defending by A's third baseman Max Schuemann. With his team trailing 3-0, Springer hit a two-out single that scored Myles Straw and moved Vlad Guerrero Jr. to second. Alejandro Kirk followed that up with a double that scored Guerrero Jr.—the Jays were rallying, baby! Woo!—and advanced Springer to third. Addison Barger must have been licking his damn chops as he prepared to step into the box with two runners in scoring position and the score now 3–2. Unfortunately, Barger was banished back to the dugout because of Springer's decision to do some ill-timed hopping on third base.  ( 21 min )

Mamta Patel Nagaraja grew up in a small town in West Texas, where her parents ran a motel. Nagaraja and her older sister were both fascinated by space, which felt like a portal into the unknown. "There wasn't much grass, but I would lie down on the concrete and just look up and wonder," she said. Nagaraja said she remembers looking up to her dad—who, at 5-foot-8, was not particularly tall—and thinking, "When I am as big as my dad, I'll be able to touch a star and grab it." While Nagaraja's sister eventually pursued other dreams, Nagaraja's never wavered. Soon after starting college, she secured an ongoing internship at NASA, which, in the early 2000s, was the only choice for aspiring astronauts. "It was kind of the Everest," Nagaraja said. "If you could get it there, then you had really made something of yourself."  ( 47 min )

Swings and roundabouts: Max Verstappen's meltdown in the closing laps of the Barcelona Grand Prix resulted in a catastrophic failure of race stewarding, but at least it was entertaining. Before that, Formula 1's historical European triple-header was turning out to be a bit of a dud. Emilia Romagna featured one astonishing overtake and little else; in spite of hacky changes to pit-stop regulations, Monaco was so grotesquely unraceable that it nearly horseshoed around into good entertainment, if one enjoys receiving early access previews of hell. If races can't even be salvaged by a close title fight between teammates, then who gives a damn about sporting fairness? It's a bad sign for the prevailing discourse cycle to be about how to make the sport less boring. At that point, why not end with a bang? At least Verstappen is always willing to deliver on that front.  ( 31 min )

Anna Merlan fleeced at the fancy market  ( 2 min )

Several weeks ago, much to my extreme displeasure, I found myself at Erewhon, staring balefully at an $88 jar of electric blue sea moss gel. If you live outside Los Angeles, you’re probably aware of Erewhon mainly as a punchline; it’s an absurdly overpriced local grocery  ( 2 min )

It was the government's solar panels that gave me hope again.  ( 8 min )

One of baseball’s top hitting prospects is headed to the majors, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports that the Royals are calling up Jac Caglianone.  The Royals have an off-day on Monday, which lines Caglianone up for his big league debut on Tuesday when the Royals start a series in St. Louis against the Cardinals.  There…  ( 14 min )

Jurupa Valley High School’s AB Hernandez won first place in girls high jump and triple jump on Saturday night at the California Interscholastic Federation's State Track & Field Championships. She also took second place in girls long jump, making it, overall, a great performance for the high school junior. After each win, Hernandez took the podium, received her medal, and smiled for photos along with her fellow competitors. She looked happy, because most people do after they win. As the sun sunk lower in the sky and the late afternoon turned into night, it would look to a casual observer watching on a livestream, which I did, like a typical high school track meet: the national anthem was played, there was a reminder about good sportsmanship, high school athletes competed in various disciplines, upcoming events were called out on the loudspeaker, and parents and friends cheered in the stands. Zoom outward, however, and there were signs that this meet was not typical. Hernandez had to share the podium and the spotlight. There was much more national coverage of the meet that would be expected, and online, discourse around Hernandez's win would swiftly turn hateful. This is all because Hernandez is trans.  ( 32 min )

Playoff basketball is intense and complicated, full of minuscule decisions that can swing a possession, a game, a series, a season. But, at its core, it can be, and often is, quite simple: The better team tends to win more often than not. In the case of the Eastern Conference Finals, after some twists and turns, this axiom proved to be true, as the Indiana Pacers bounced back following a lackluster Game 5 to close out the New York Knicks on home court in dominant fashion, 125-108. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ScmGeaPIs  ( 29 min )

After coming close in the 2020 final, as well as plenty of other knockout exits over the last decade and a half, Paris Saint-Germain finally won the club's first Champions League trophy, thanks to a 5-0 stomp of Internazionale that, somehow, wasn't even as close as that record scoreline—the biggest in a Champions League final ever—would suggest. On a Saturday night in Munich, PSG shed off its demons, sure, but it also demonstrated what had been clear once it got over a rather desperate start to the Champions League: The French league and cup winners were the best team in Europe this season, the most dominant force en route to its long-awaited glory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAbl7ZAy1dY  ( 31 min )

Seth Lugo made his return to the Royals’ rotation yesterday, and the right-hander showed some rust in allowing four runs over 3 1/3 innings in Kansas City’s 7-5 loss to Detroit.  A sprained middle finger sent Lugo to the 15-day injured list on May 14, and in the corresponding roster move for Lugo’s activation, the…  ( 12 min )

A woman sued Pelicans power forward Zion Williamson on Thursday, saying Williamson raped her multiple times. She also said in the complaint that he physically hurt her, stalked her, and threatened to kill her and her family. The woman filed as Jane Doe in Los Angeles County Superior Court and said the violence occurred while she and Williamson were dating for several years. The lawsuit listed nine causes of action: assault, battery, sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, domestic violence, stalking, burglary, false imprisonment, and conversion. A lawyer for Williamson responded by issuing a statement saying the allegations were "categorically false and reckless" and calling the lawsuit "an attempt to exploit a professional athlete driven by a financial motive rather than any legitimate grievance."  ( 26 min )

I’m about to spoil the ending of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning for you, but that’s fine. You don’t go to an M:I movie for things like “a coherent plot” or “fully realized characters.” You go for the stunts, for Tom Cruise breaking into a dead sprint, and for shit to blow up real good. Going by those metrics, The Final Reckoning delivers. I got my money’s worth, and then some. But there was one extra draw to The Final Reckoning, which was that it was presumably the final movie Cruise would do for the franchise. After all, “The Final Reckoning” is right there in the title. Also, Cruise is 62 years old and surely hellbent on finally getting himself a Best Actor statuette before he goes to Scientology heaven. So it made perfect sense for him to bow out of this series while his limbs were still intact.  ( 26 min )

Talk about HIGH seas! Here’s a video of Patriots wideout Stefon Diggs pulling an offseason Odell Beckham to pARRRRGHty with some lovely ladies (and girlfriend Cardi B) on a luxury yacht: https://twitter.com/imabout2tweetu/status/1927326121688756522  ( 26 min )

In quiet moments, you can almost hear the faint sizzling sound of AI corroding humanity's capacity for inquiry and sustained, focused thought. The arguments against this—that the technology itself does not work very well, or at all; that the ability to reason things out on our own is actually both important for a healthy society and more or less the thing that makes us human—don't seem to be working, and have barely registered. People ask chatbots or AI-larded search engines for answers to questions that chatbots inherently cannot understand, receive a confidently phrased but often luridly wrong result, and move on grateful for the convenience and exactly zero percent wiser for having done so. It is not just that the responses might be incorrect, although they really might be; it's that asking the question at all seems only to make the answer recede further into abstraction. This is something that even the smartest people in the most specialized areas are experiencing, so you can only imagine how stupid the results might be when someone like me does something with it. Here is an example of this. An online friend noted yesterday that Google's search delivered some surprising and hard to explain results on the question of what Sam Presti's name is. This would not seem to be much of a question at all, and the AI overview's answer seemed self-evident. Sam Presti's name, it said, is Sam Presti.  ( 33 min )

The topic, in Defector's internal chat, on Friday, was a ban, in the nation of France, on smoking in most outdoor spaces. How can the French—the French!—ban smoking? David Roth observed that "this feels like one of those things that leads to a bunch of guys in day-glow vests overturning a police van"; Kelsey McKinney said "they're gonna light the streets on fire"; Barry Petchesky quipped that it is "time for le vape." The discussion then drifted onto the topic of which world populations smoke the most cigarettes (the Balkans, apparently?). But suddenly, Slack warned: Dave McKenna is typing. This is the Slack equivalent of hearing the hiss of a burning fuse. Here, lightly edited to remove various lols and feeble attempts at returning to the subject of world smoking habits, is what ensued.  ( 41 min )

There was a time not that long ago when the West Sacramento Athletics were positioning themselves to replace The Hunny Club as the pride of Yolo County, which would have been a true festival of inner conflict for the region. By "not that long ago," we mean May 5. Since then, the A’s have clarified their position. And by "clarified their position," we mean "challenged the Colorado Rockies for the title of worst baseball team on earth." The A’s are back in their customary spot as a readily visible example of an organization loathing everything it inadvertently represents, and The Hunny Club has solidified its hold on Yolo’s hearts, if only because of the acronym.  ( 28 min )

John Laurinaitis has pulled off a twist worthy of his time as on-screen GM of WWE Monday Night Raw. That is, it was very obviously coming well before it happened. WWE’s former head of talent relations has been dropped as a co-defendant in Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit accusing Vince McMahon of gross sexual acts. Representatives for Grant and Laurinaitis announced a settlement-cooperation deal earlier this week; a statement said Laurinaitis will provide “evidence” against McMahon. “His agreement to a confidential settlement is a pivotal next step toward holding McMahon and WWE accountable and bringing justice to Ms. Grant after years of sexual abuse and trafficking,” representatives for Grant and Laurinaitis said in the joint statement. “Mr. Laurinaitis looks forward to moving on with his life.”  ( 22 min )

My first favorite search engine was Lycos. Why? There’s no single explanation. I know it had a dog logo, which very possibly made a positive impression on my younger self. It had an exotic-sounding name, so that was a point in its favor. But I just felt like it fit my vibe. AOL? We didn't pay for that. Ask Jeeves? OK, boomer (is what I would have said if I was sassy and/or prescient). Alta Vista? Yahoo? (Apologies—Yahoo!?) I dunno; they weren't for me. In some small way, there was some identity-making going on. But nothing that happened on a computer at that time felt very consequential to me. What were computers for, after all? I didn't really play video games, aside from a brief phase of getting pretty into Civilization (I or II or III? I have no idea). I remember a cousin showing me Myst and being impressed but confused; I remember playing Doom, probably with a sibling or a neighbor. But all of the stuff that happened on the computer seemed a little pointless, a little dull, a little like work. Observationally, people used it to stare at spreadsheets, and to write stuff. (Lame!) Games were on disks (actual floppies, nominal floppies, or CD-ROMs). Otherwise, it was just a boring work box.  ( 43 min )

Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a new recurring series about books and reading them. My home is full of books. Because I am able to justify it as “supporting the local bookstore” and “keeping my own career afloat,” I am constantly buying books. I have four full bookshelves of fiction and three of non-fiction. There are two individual shelves of poetry, and a shelf just for the collected works of Shakespeare. There is a half a shelf of books in my office that I have not read yet, but might want to read one day. But sometimes, I pick through them all, and I do not want them. I want to read something, but what?  ( 28 min )

Late in the New York Knickerbockers' conprehensive but semi-drab 111–94 beating of the Indiana Pacers, TNT analyst Stan Van Gundy took his inner grump for one final walk around the broadcast by saying something along the lines of, After Game 4, people were asking why Jalen Brunson couldn't be a little more like Tyrese Haliburton, and after Game 5 they'll be asking why Tyrese Haliburton couldn't be a little bit more like Jalen Brunson. It was, yes, another lament about who the next face of the NBA's Eastern Conference would be, because the game itself carried so little entertainment. In fairness, the first four games had been excellent and Game 4 preposterously so, thus Game 5 would have to suffer by comparison. That the margin of fun between the two was this large, though, came as a bit of an annoyance to Van Gundy, and to be sure nearly anyone not sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden. Frankly, the biggest moment in Knicks–Pacers was when Peter DeBoer hooked goaltender Jake Oettinger after eight minutes in Dallas' 6-3 series-killing loss to Edmonton.  ( 26 min )

Breakfast is my favorite meal. Why? Because its boundaries are well defined. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’re going to eat. There are only certain things that are okay to eat for breakfast.  Eggs, for example. Eggs are a classic breakfast  ( 2 min )

Breakfast with Hamilton Nolan, and Zito Madu on sports superstitions  ( 2 min )

One of the great things about watching sports with people who usually don’t watch sports is that they ask obvious-seeming questions that cause knowledgeable sports fans to realize how ridiculous the games and the culture around them can be. This ridiculousness isn’t necessarily bad, it’  ( 2 min )

Kansas City needs to call up Caglianone to prevent a terrible offense from dragging down its best pitching staff since the 1980s.

Elected Democrats can't move on this time.  ( 4 min )

The Royals officially released Hunter Renfroe yesterday, according to the MLB.com transaction log. This was the expected outcome after Kansas City designated the veteran outfielder for assignment last week. K.C.’s surprising two-year free agent investment in Renfroe did not work. The Royals guaranteed him $13.5MM on a deal that also included an opt-out clause after the…  ( 12 min )

The Royals’ offensive struggles aren’t exactly a secret. Kansas City is contending in the American League not because of its lineup but in spite of its lineup. Arguably no contender in MLB has been as anemic at the plate as the Royals, who sport a .246/.301/.361 batting line as a team. The resulting 83 wRC+…  ( 19 min )

Crashing the Venice Biennale with Tod Seelie  ( 2 min )

It’s a long story that started with a dream and some junk rafts.  Four years after setting off on a journey that started on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and took us as far as the Hudson River and NYC, the crew of the Swimming Cities were  ( 2 min )

Drew and I agreed before Memorial Day weekend that it was time for a Just The Two Of Us episode of The Distraction, but it wasn't until much closer to recording it that we decided what kind of episode that would be. There is more than one kind of those, and while we were probably due for one of the loopy, pre-vacation, Oops! All Digressions episodes, there is a whole long summer ahead of us to fill with those, and still some really good playoff basketball happening. Between the fact of that dwindling season and Drew's latter-day return to NBA fandom, the decision was decently easy. It's a just-us episode, but this one is also About Sports.  ( 25 min )

Late in the second set of his matchup with French doubles specialist Pierre-Hugues Herbert, 18-year-old Brazilian player João Fonseca scored a point to even the tenth game of the set at 30–all. "Scored" is the most active verb I can use there, as the exchange only ended when Herbert dumped an unthreatening rally ball into the net. Yet Fonseca erupted into a celebration, conducting the crowd into a froth, asking for more energy, more pressure. It was like stepping to the free-throw line and cupping a hand to one's ear for more noise. Fonseca lost that game, though he won the set in a tiebreak, then took the third set, 6–4, to move on to the third round of the French Open. There is a lot to love about Fonseca, the ebullient princeling of men's tennis. To me, the most striking thing about the Fonseca experience, more than the actual striking itself, is his relationship with pressure. He doesn't shy from it; he courts it. He doesn't wilt; he locks in. Fonseca demands attention, and he performs, displaying a magnetic brand of confidence in his equally magnetic game. I can't look away.  ( 27 min )

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, is yet another remake that was released in 2020, and the third such game to appear in this column. The lesson it provides is that sometimes the best way to remake a game is also the simplest.  ( 40 min )

Becca Beckham grew up around the South in a military family. Beckham's family moved every two to four years, and she grew up, she says, with public service in her heart. "The military really shaped my family, and I appreciate everything that it's done," she said. "But I knew in my heart that that is not the path that I wanted to take." Beckham always knew she wanted to experience more of the United States. In college, she became interested in the Peace Corps, and then AmeriCorps—the federal agency that organizes community service across the nation. "It's this vague, big thing that a lot of people have heard of, but they're not necessarily sure what it does," Beckham said. AmeriCorps, envisioned as the national version of the Peace Corps, was created in 1993 under President Bill Clinton. The agency offers people opportunities to serve communities across the U.S., addressing needs such as education, disaster response, and public health. Beckham joined an AmeriCorps program that led a team of 10 people around the nation for a year, working on disaster relief efforts in Missouri, Colorado, Texas, Alabama, and New York.  ( 49 min )

Every March, I get an email from Joan Lanigan at City Hall: The Binder has arrived. The Spelling Bee words are in The Binder. I need The Binder because I'm the Pronouncer.  ( 50 min )

I'd say it had to be Carter Verhaeghe, and in fact it was, but to give him the full credit for yet another heartbreaking playoff goal would obscure the effort of Aleksander Barkov, who deserves the majority of the applause for the late game-winner in the Panthers' series clincher against the Hurricanes. Thanks to this pair, Florida is heading to the Stanley Cup Final for the third straight year. And they've made it this far looking just as tough, nasty, and talented—if not even more so. Hurricanes fans couldn't have had much hope after their team went down three games to none, but the next four periods of hockey might have shown them, briefly, a glimmer of light. There was the shutout win on Monday to start, and then on Wednesday, Sebastian Aho managed to beat Sergei Bobrovsky twice in the first period for a 2-0 lead. That early advantage wasn't enough, though. Florida hit them with three goals in the middle of the second period, and after Seth Jarvis struck back to tie it for the home team in the third, Verhaeghe silenced the Carolina crowd for the summer.  ( 25 min )

The following excerpt is from Victoria Zeller's debut novel One of the Boys, released from Levine Querido on May 13. The book follows 17-year old Grace, a D-I bound kicker who left the world of football behind (or so she thought) when she came out as trans.  ( 50 min )

Rick Derringer, a rock and roll lifer, a force behind the “rock 'n wrestling” melding of the 1980s and other sporting and music nexuses, is dead. Derringer died Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. No official cause of death was released, but a family member said he'd been suffering from complications from heart surgery earlier this year. He was 77.  ( 28 min )

"NBA people will tell you the toughest game to win in the playoffs is the close-out game," explained Mike Breen, minutes before the opening tip of Game 5 of the Western Conference final, by way of laying down the stakes. "And that's OKC's challenge tonight, because Minnesota is playing for their season." There was a quality of pleading in Breen's face: A certain matte non-twinkle in the eyes, a tendency of the outer points of features to turn down. He was a man grappling with an expression, actively managing his mouth shapes and struggling to etch something delight-ish into the available margins. Perhaps you are thinking this is an artifact of botox. That is not your damn business! To me Breen's face was succumbing in realtime not to the horrors of botulism but to the burden of forced hope…  ( 34 min )

Kansas City could be on its way to one of the greatest seasons of stolen base prevention that any of us has ever seen.

This is a below-average system with one big fish at the very top, several high-variance hitters with hit tool risk, and a fair number of pitchers with starter-quality command.

It's well past time social media companies are forced to face the horrors they've created  ( 7 min )

The Royals released Nelson Velázquez this afternoon. The news was announced by their Triple-A affiliate in Omaha. The club also announced that they’ve activated Cavan Biggio, suggesting the veteran infielder has agreed to accept the minor league assignment after being optioned over the weekend. Velázquez had already been outrighted off Kansas City’s 40-man roster during…  ( 11 min )

The Royals announced that they have selected the contract of right-hander Andrew Hoffmann. Left-hander Evan Sisk has been optioned to Triple-A Omaha as the corresponding active roster move. The club’s 40-man roster had a couple of vacancies and moves to 39 with this move. Hoffmann, 25, gets up to the big leagues for the first…  ( 11 min )

Brian Hioe on the death of a friend; the first voting round of our new word game  ( 2 min )

The time of reckoning is here.  ( 1 min )

It’s a strange feeling, attending a memorial in a faraway land for someone you’ve never met. I was there for a business trip and it overlapped with the funeral of the friend of a friend, who had died the previous year. She had been jailed after  ( 2 min )

The other day, bemoaning the state of his WNBA fantasy team bench, my colleague Jasper mentioned that he’d just picked up a player he’d never heard of: someone named "K. Westbeld," with no photo. This was more or less how the real Phoenix Mercury conducted their offseason business. The team has not owned its first-round pick in five straight drafts. To construct the new “big three” of Kahleah Copper, Alyssa Thomas and Satou Sabally, Phoenix dealt away virtually every other rotation role player they had. Basketball teams tend to have more than three players on them. So began an offseason scrounge through the photoless.  But don’t judge a player by her lack of photo! Two weeks into the WNBA season, the Mercury are one of the most fun teams to watch, in large part thanks to international scouting finds the average WNBA fan had not heard of before now. In Kathryn Westbeld—and fellow new signings Monique Akoa Makani, Kitija Laksa and Lexi Held—the Mercury have some real role-player gems. They defend, pass, shoot, and generally make good decisions. At home against the Sky on Tuesday, they led the team to a 94-89 win after trailing by 16 in the third. An incredible fourth quarter saw Laksa, Akoa Makani and Westbeld combine for six threes.  ( 27 min )

When the nervous peloton began their long, slow ascent up out of the Adda River valley to Bormio to finish Stage 17 of the Giro d'Italia, I thought Isaac Del Toro was cooked. The 21-year-old Mexican rider had put up an admirable fight for the first 16 stages of the Giro, and though he'd clung on to the maglia rosa leader's jersey longer than anyone expected he'd be able to, third weeks of Grand Tours are unforgiving, especially for a young rider who has never faced the pressure of defending a leader's jersey before. One day earlier, Del Toro cracked on the San Valentino, losing over 90 seconds to the hardened Richard Carapaz and the moderately hardened Simon Yates; one climb earlier, Carapaz and Yates made him quiver. It stood to reason that Del Toro's infirmity would compound, and the veterans would do him the courtesy of easing the pain of carrying the jersey. Instead, he seized the initiative and smoked everyone to win his first Grand Tour stage in style.  ( 30 min )

Like brother Magary, I have been re-energized as a fan by this year’s NBA playoffs, although I do admit that watching Jayson Tatum take one of Paris’s arrows harshed my mellow considerably—classical allusion courtesy of the Society of Jesus, circa 1974. It  was partly un-harshed by the emergence of Luke Kornet, Force of Nature. But, otherwise, it has been a voyage of discovery. I knew Anthony Edwards because my friend Tom Crean had recruited him at Georgia, but Jaden McDaniels was a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t keep Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic straight for the longest time. Tyrese Haliburton might have been the lead singer for the Spinners for all I knew. When did Shai Gilgeous-Alexander get this good?  ( 33 min )

Credit where credit is due: USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan has tried very hard to establish herself as the nation's foremost Caitlin Clark alarmist. Whenever something routine for a pro athlete happens to the Indiana Fever's star, Brennan's job is to turn it into a matter of existential concern for the WNBA, a league that has 12 other teams. This week's news provided another opportunity. Crisis alert: Caitlin Clark has strained her quad. Can women's basketball as a whole possibly soldier on? The tone of Brennan's latest column might mislead the reader into thinking that Caitlin Clark has died. In reality, the Fever guard is only sidelined for at least a couple of weeks; after Tuesday's practice she was casually putting up three-pointers. In Brennan's reality, this is a recession-level event for the WNBA:  ( 25 min )

Stuart Skinner offers little in the way of championship onomatopoeia, which is to say his name does not suggest athletic greatness. It suggests the secretary-treasurer of the chess club, or an unprepared con artist trying to spontaneously impersonate Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg. But Skinner owns, for now, the Stanley Cup fate of the Edmonton Oilers, and by extension the possibility that a Canadian team might win it all for the first time since 1993. As the Oilers' goaltender he has defined both the glories and horrors of being an Oil fan, because there is never a guarantee of what level of quality he will provide.  ( 24 min )

Donald Trump released yet another deranged statement on Tuesday, demanding that a transgender high school student be barred from participating in the California state track and field championships, which are scheduled to be held this weekend in Clovis, Calif. The inane thoughts that make their way from Trump's obviously diminished mind onto his Playskool social media platform should not demand the attention of any right-thinking Americans, and yet in this case the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) snapped to attention, rewriting its qualification rules in an attempt to appease those behind what's become a national hate campaign directed at a 16-year-old high school student. The student Trump was referring to in his post is named AB Hernandez. She is set to compete in the high jump, triple jump, and long jump at the state championships, and she has spent the past few months being harassed by a local group of bigots. This group is led by Sonja Shaw and Jessica Tapia, both members of the Save Girls Sports association. Shaw is currently running for California superintendent of public instruction, and Tapia was recently fired from her teaching position at Hernandez's high school for refusing to respect trans and nonbinary students' pronouns. At a qualification meet earlier this month, Tapia and Shaw led a group that spent hours heckling and harassing Hernandez as she competed.  ( 26 min )

Junior high is tough for everyone. Shifting friendships! Being stuck somewhere between childhood and adolescence! All those hormones! If you’re lucky, you don’t also have to manage a parent who thinks they can backseat-drive you through all the challenges that come with being 13.  This week, we’re off to a prestigious private school in the West Village, where our friend-of-a-friend Ellen will have to figure out how involved she wants to get in her daughter’s 8th-grade fundraising competition. Unfortunately, it seems like Ellen’s mom-nemesis, Hazel, has no intention of playing by the rules. Would it be moral to just let Hazel get away with that?  ( 22 min )

The pattern was: The New York Knicks would scramble the length of the floor in desperation—frantic, wide-eyed, bolts rattling loose, spotting passing and dribbling lanes just as they snapped shut—in search of a bucket. When they got one, it scanned most credibly as an accident. Then, whether the Knicks got one or not, the Indiana Pacers would breeze unimpeded the other way and Tyrese Haliburton would create a wide-open, high-value shot for himself or somebody else within seven seconds. That pattern leads where anybody would expect it to go. The Pacers won Game 4 of the Eastern conference final Tuesday night, 130–121, and now lead the series three games to one. When the Pacers wasted any tightly distributed handful of the approximately infinite good looks they enjoyed on the night, the Knicks could hang around, aided by 39 free-throw attempts and an unaccountable second-quarter stretch in which they wiped away a 10-point deficit and took a one-point lead with Delon Wright on the floor and Jalen Brunson off it. (Wright found time to commit a double-dribble violation in there, and played a shade under two minutes in the second half.) But the Pacers never relented so long that they couldn't just breeze back out to a multi-possession lead with 90 seconds of focus once they locked back in. Haliburton in particular delivered what's probably, given the circumstances, the best game of his career so far: 32 points, 15 assists, 12 rebounds, four steals, and not a single turnover, despite doing the vast bulk of Indiana's ball-handling and creating over his 38 minutes. Even as his shooting cooled off after a bonkers first quarter, he maintained Indiana's lunatic pace, kept the buzzsaw whirring, and sectioned New York's defense to toothpicks.  ( 27 min )

Jennie Rose Halperin on the women trying to protect the Library of Congress; a new word game for subscribers  ( 2 min )

On May 8, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden received an email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of White House personnel, in which he fired her with no cause “effective immediately,” “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump.” Hayden, who was nominated to serve by President  ( 2 min )

A word game for subscribers of FLAMING HYDRA  ( 1 min )

Let us approach Shohei Ohtani as naively as possible, while admitting that in the case of Ohtani this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse. For the span of time that he has been on the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ohtani has been a designated hitter, and a very good one: He won the MVP last year in spite of being a designated hitter, and this year has been, depending on how you count, either the second- or third-best offensive player in MLB. The best is Aaron Judge, who is doing Aaron Judge things; the other second- or third-best player is, naturally, Ohtani's teammate Freddie Freeman; Ohtani currently has both of them, as well as every other player in MLB, beat on home run tally. Here is what that looks like over the course of a long weekend. The Dodgers came into it in a bit of a mire: a four-game loss streak, followed by a three-game win streak, followed in turn by another loss. Then their designated hitter opened up the final game of their series against the New York Mets by doing this:  ( 24 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about method acting, fickle stovetops, the Colorado Rockies, and more. Brendan:  ( 58 min )

The Florida Panthers, as terrifying a hockey team as they are, have made a bit of a habit out of elongating their playoff series. Take their slow start in Toronto last round, or the three they lost while up 3-0 to the Oilers last Stanley Cup Final. In all likelihood, their shutout loss on Monday night will be just another snooze button. But after a trio of wins in the Eastern Conference Final where the Panthers used the Hurricanes like a bonfire does newspaper, the Canes earned at least one victory to hang their helmets on. If nothing else from this series goes Carolina's way—and so far, it hasn't—they'll at least have the excellent stretch of hockey that eventually delivered the game-winner in Game 4. This action was tense until a pair of empty-netters carried the Hurricanes to a 3-0 final. But Carolina did a spectacular job limiting the defending champions' chances on net. Keeping the ice tilted has been the team's personal path to victory year after year, but against the fury, physicality, and plain old talent of Florida, the Canes shrunk into something unrecognizable as they lost three games by a combined score of 16-4. Here, however, the team out-efforted the Pants, particularly from the midpoint of the first period through a Carolina penalty late in the second. In that time, Florida produced absolutely nothing of note on offense and relied on Sergei Bobrovsky to be tidy in goal. At 0-0 with the clincher in sight, Florida might still have felt fairly comfortable, but it was Logan Stankoven who ensured that his Hurricanes' momentum would not go wasted.  ( 24 min )

The end of this clip is why Paul Maurice is the greatest coach of all time in any sport, in one specific category: lectern domination. The whole thing is worth a watch, as all his pressers are, pregame, postgame or even off-day, but the last 10 seconds are killer, especially if you keep in mind that his team just lost a chance to clinch a trip to the Stanley Cup Final by playing a game he admitted he "didn't like." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt87itZr_kc  ( 28 min )

I went into Overcompensating knowing very little, except that it was a vehicle for comic Benito Skinner. I know Skinner, like most people know him, through his @bennydrama7 Instagram account. He started it while still a high school student in Ohio—seven was the number on his football jersey—but only began posting his celebrity impressions and campy sketches as a college student at Georgetown. I specifically know him for one of my favorite bits of satire ever. I cannot for the life of me find it anymore, and my description won't do it justice, but it's basically Skinner parodying the work of Brampton bard Rupi Kaur—no one calls her that; all you need to know is that she's an extremely famous extremely terrible Instagram poet (example: “a man who cries – a gift”) who comes from a town near e…  ( 30 min )

At some point near the start of the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the Western Conference Final, in which the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves, 128-126, a thought occurred to me: These teams are playing too hard. It just didn't seem possible that an NBA game could withstand that much sustained frenzy and focus from its participants. I had a vision of several players suddenly collapsing on the floor, all of their mental and physical energy spent. I saw the fans in the arena becoming nauseous, unable to safely metabolize the potency of the basketball that was unfolding before them. Adam Silver was going to rush the court and put a stop to everything. No, no, you can't do this, he'd shout. You're going to ruin the rest of the games. Monday's game was unquestionably the best we've had so far in these playoffs. That's an achievement in and of itself, considering how inert this series felt after the first two games, in which the Thunder seemingly established themselves as several classes above their opponent. But Minnesota caught Oklahoma City with all sorts of haymakers in Game 3, winning that one by 42, and so they came into Game 4 at the very least convinced that they could stand and trade. What resulted from that belief meeting the Thunder's resolve to avenge the embarrassment of Game 3 was a game that reached and stayed at the highest levels of intensity for 48 minutes.  ( 28 min )

The idea of a Rogan-style podcaster sympathetic to liberal causes betrays a misunderstanding of Rogan himself  ( 7 min )