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On Monday, the day after his arrest on a criminal charge of engaging in prostitution—later pleaded down to disorderly conduct—San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, through his lawyer, submitted a motion in his criminal case. Specifically, he asked to the court to seal all records related to it. His stated justification? The owner's request, which you can see in full by clicking here, gave a bit of background on the case before outlining the following reasons: 2. The Defendant is an eligible offender as defined by R.C. §2953.31. 3. There are no criminal proceedings pending against the Defendant. 4. The Defendant has been satisfactorily rehabilitated and poses no risk of recidivism. 5. The Defendant's interest in having the official records pertaining to the cases sealed outweighs any legitimate need of the government to maintain those records.

A not-insignificant part of my job is fielding phone calls from freelance writers who have questions. The questions can vary—Have you heard of any job openings? Are you interested in this pitch? An editor at another publication is trying to screw me, what should I do? Can you help me get a credential to this…

Some people are fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars. Your 2025 record: 13-4, which got you a division title and a brief mention on page 18 of the newspaper, right under the foreclosure announcements. Curious how your chronically irrelevant team pulled this off? Put your Crocs in sport mode and take a walk with me.

The Vuelta a España, long the runt sibling among cycling's Grand Tours, promised to be bigger and better than usual this year, thanks primarily to the participation of Tadej Pogacar. The protests that stymied last year's race had successfully de-Israelized the peloton, and the 2026 edition had the glitz of a Monaco start, the showcase of the best rider in the world going for the win, and an interesting, adversarial course. But this is the Vuelta, where weird stuff happens, and the race stumbled into a controversy of its own making on its very first day because the organizers hired a viral vertical-video prankster to promote it. Meet Erola Jons. The 28-year-old Catalan influencer has racked up millions of followers (and presumably millions of Euros) by going around with a tiny microphone and pranking unsuspecting passersby by pretending to flirt with them. The Vuelta gave Jons an all-access pass with the idea that she could take people behind the scenes, interview riders and staffers, and bring all 21 stages to the world. https://twitter.com/lavuelta/status/2091205277081043398

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 Tommy John, Tony Romo, babies at the movies, and more. Your letters: DP:

The Arizona Diamondbacks are angry at Quintin Berry, third base coach for the Chicago Cubs. Several Diamondbacks, including manager Torey Lovullo, suspected Monday night that Berry was picking up the changeup grip of Diamondbacks starting pitcher Merrill Kelly and then using not-subtle-enough hand gestures to ping information to Cubs hitters, relayed through a runner on second base. This matter came to a head in the fifth inning, with Michael Busch facing a full count at the plate and Seiya Suzuki on second base following a double off the wall in left. Berry did something with his left hand and Kelly stepped off the rubber and glared at him. Diamondbacks bench coach Jeff Banister, who has a terrific old worn-out baseball face, first lit into Berry, and then pitching coach Brian Kaplan shouted across the diamond to Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty, and then the two dugouts woofed back and forth and exchanged theatrical finger wags. https://youtu.be/cuajtaM9xas?t=408 Pitch-tipping is regarded as largely the problem of a sloppy pitcher, and exploiting it is well within the bounds of acceptable gamesmanship. The Diamondbacks do not disagree. What they apparently object to, as Kelly explained after the game, is when a coach gets involved in the action. The way Kelly sees it, he is a player competing against other players, and if those players pick up on his grips and kick his ass, that's just how it goes. But he is less cool with the involvement of some middle-aged bozo from over on the other side of the base line. Kelly makes a reasonable case.

John Ross knows a thing or two about self-deception. The songwriter and frontman of Wild Pink fills Still Coming Down, the latest from the shapeshifting New York indie group, with stories of men who have cooked their brains and lost their souls, without gaining much in the bargain. They rob banks, fall down internet rabbitholes, go to bars to bet alone on their phones. They tell themselves stories, but they don't really believe them. "Your brain is very kind to make you think you're warm inside," one man allows, but even he knows it's a ruse: "You're so cold, you're dying." These are all-American losers, too hopeless to hate, but without much going for them all the same, and Ross is their bard. Wry and ironic, with a wide-ranging mind and just a smidge of compassion, his songs have the ring of a confession made by someone who does not really want to be forgiven. "How much of God's love can you take day in and day out?" he asks on "Plates Keep Spinning," the story of a man who fears waking back up in the afterlife and having to keep on with the same old shit. His narrators are exhausted, resigned to lives they've slumped into and lack the will (or the energy) to change. "Thought it was something, turns out it's nothing," he sings on "Dead for a Sec," a lifetime condensed into a single exhale. "I still don't really understand where the time went." Ross might understand these men, but he's hardly a slacker. With Wild Pink he has put out six albums in the last nine years, not to mention plenty of EPs and standalone singles. Restless and ambitious, he has pushed the band's sound from dreamy bedroom pop through War On Drugs–style space rock and on into wall-of-sound opus territory. This approach hasn't always worked out—2022's self-produced ILYSM has some luminous songs, but never finds a center—but it's been exciting to follow, and has produced a diverse and surprising body of work. As Ross put it on 2024's "Eating the Egg Whole": "My stupid ass is always searching." Well damn, mine too.

It's nearly impossible to relay a single fact about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott that does not stop an unfamiliar recipient dead in their tracks. For example: She was suspended from baseball in 1993 for the repeated use of racial slurs, which included referring to Reds stars Eric Davis and Dave Parker as her "million-dollar niggers." A few years after her suspension, MLB forced her into selling the team, in part because she said, of Adolf Hitler, "Everything you read, when he came in he was good. They built tremendous highways and got all the factories going." She kept a Nazi armband in a desk drawer in her house. She was an alcoholic, and was probably drunk when she took the field before Game 1 of the 1990 World Series and told the assembled crowd that she was dedicating the Series to American troops "in the Middle West." Thirty minutes later, she was on the field once again, this time with television cameras rolling, reiterating that the Series was being played in honor of "our wonderful men and women over in the Far East." She was enraged when the Reds won the 1990 World Series in a 4-0 sweep, because the shortened series robbed her of lucrative gate receipts. She used to let her dog, a big St. Bernard named Schottzie, piss and shit on the Reds' field. This is just a small sampling of facts about Schott that can be found in Marge Schott: Unleashed, by former Cincinnati Post sportswriter Mike Bass. Aside from being a juicy, well-reported investigation into Schott's scandalous tenure as owner of the Reds, it is also a fascinating artifact of a time when access and resources were more readily available to sports reporters. The book was released in 1993, the same year that Schott was suspended, and features dozens of on-the-record testimonies from people who worked closely with her. News of Schott's racist behavior was slow to escape Cincinnati, and when it did, the national media often provided surface-level coverage. The situation cried out for a more complete portrait of Schott and her place in the game, and Bass provided one nearly simultaneous to the scandal's unfolding.

The last real star in the universe will be a red dwarf. This will not be for some time yet. The conditions are ripe for stars to be formed, to live out their lives, to burn out or explode, in cycles for the next 100 trillion years. The universe is, then, unimaginably young, as far as things go, at just 13.8 billion years. If the lifespan of the so-called Stelliferous Era were a single 24-hour day, we'd be nearly 12 seconds in. But one day, all that stellar fuel will be used up, distributed, converted from delicious and powerful hydrogen to more complex elements useless for star formation. The day will come when no new stars are being born, and the ones that exist will start to go out, one by one, forever. Of the hydrogen-burning stars, red dwarfs will hang on the longest. G-type main-sequence stars like our Sun get a few billion years before they exhaust their fuel. Red dwarfs possess a lifespan of about 10 trillion years. We think. It's all theoretical, since we have yet to actually observe the death of a red dwarf star, because—again—the universe hasn't existed nearly long enough for any of them to die.

Post-apocalyptic comedies have not been in vogue since the notably less comic actual apocalypse has started filling our windscreens. Even moderately depraved cultural products like Survivor and Squid Game have stopped short of ritually killing and eating lesser characters as part of the competition. Then again, those shows don't pretend to be comedies, and so could easily make cannibalism part of the show without a sizable loss in audience. We bring that up to open your minds to the idea of the Survivor contestants rising up as one and finishing off Jeff Probst with a nice coconut chianti once and for all. Now that would be comedy. But because that hasn't happened (yet), we can say that this genre pretty much topped out with Red Dwarf, the hydraheaded British comedy of yesteryear that took the post-apocalypse and pushed it into a corner in which there was only one human left, plus a hologram, a cat, a neurotic robot butler, a ship-piloting head, a brief unrequited love interest, and a few spare characters here and there. Mostly there, because Earth was not part of the universe Rob Grant and Doug Naylor plotted out when they first pitched an idea they had originally assembled as a series of sketches for the radio called Dave Hollins: Space Cadet. They proposed it to a typically obstinate BBC programming department—typical, because all programming departments are preternaturally wired to say no to anything that hasn't been done six other times before. It was eventually greenlit by BBC North in Manchester through the persuasive powers of Grant, Naylor, and producer Paul Jackson, and debuted on BBC Two in 1988. Yes, that's 38 years ago. What of it? The broader plot, which any good smeghead (more on that in a bit) could recite in their sleep, is simple enough. It is certainly unencumbered by a surfeit of extraneous characters. A human technician on an outer space salvage ship who is known mostly for being an unambitious slob is punished for smuggling a cat on board and then for refusing to surrender said cat; he is imprisoned in stasis for what is supposed to be 30 days. While he was busy being inert, the ship incurs a radiation leak that kills everyone on board except him, and the ship's computer does not release him until the radiation levels are once again acceptable for humans—which is three million years later.