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Back when the conservative activist James O'Keefe first made his mark in the deceptively edited hidden-camera sting video business 15 years ago, he probably did not envision spending his early forties masterminding an operation that would lead to the firing of a mid-level Washington Commanders employee for some out-of-pocket things he said on a pair of secretly recorded dates. O'Keefe, one of the more baroquely damaged defectives in reactionary media, is destroying less notable lives now than he did during the years when the videos he produced led to the resignations of NPR executives and the collapse of the activist organization ACORN, but his rancid body of work is compelling proof that the destruction is something like its own reward for him. O'Keefe's taste in enemies has never been especially creative, which reflects both what vintage of conservative he is—vain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of metro-NYC suburbia psychosis on the finish—and the business that he's in. Project Veritas, which O'Keefe built by crafting videos that exposed various conservative culture-war enemies in ways built to fit their laziest media caricatures, was a nonprofit business supported by rich conservatives, and so generally aimed to scratch the recurring itches of those old, dull, nasty people. Sometimes, as with ACORN, O'Keefe got the results he sought. Mostly, he succeeded in helping people whose politics revolve around being scandalized and upset remain in their desired state of agitation, and in raising money from them to help with his many lawsuits.

Beverley started a new chapter in July when he signed with Israeli basketball team Hapoel Tel Aviv. Through his podcast, he's established that he does not have a sense of where he is.

Somewhere on the seafloor of an oceanic canyon near Vancouver Island in 2022, scientists dropped a bundle of video and audio recording gear and a carousel loaded with 24 bottles. Each bottle contained a hefty sardine bathed in vegetable oil, and the carousel was programmed to release one sardine every two weeks to attract the deep-sea fish skulking in the area. The muddy bottom served as stomping grounds for sleek sablefish, noodly eelpouts and hagfish, and flabby snailfish, all of whom roam in nearly absolute darkness, aside from glimmers of bioluminescence. At more than 2,000 feet deep, the observatory is one of many deep-sea observatories set up by Ocean Networks Canada, all capturing real-time data of creatures living in the area. The researchers wanted to learn if the fish in the canyon behaved differently around bait in the presence of artificial lights. "Some are attracted, and some avoid it," Héloïse Frouin-Mouy, a marine biologist and bio-acoustician specializing in marine mammals at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. The observatory had both video and acoustic cameras to monitor the behavior of fish with the lights on and off.

In general, it is pretty difficult to get me to feel nostalgic for things that happened after I graduated college. My 20s, for all their excitement and over-the-topness, are one big blur of noise, brunch, and credit card debt. But there is just the tiniest section of my heart, a roped-off VIP section, where I feel the pangs of youth pull at me. And more often than not, it is triggered whenever I revisit what I believe to be the best rap project of the 2010s. https://youtu.be/YVzZPNyC4K4?feature=shared

The premise of National Novel Writing Month is seductively simple: Participants enter the month of November with an idea and leave it as a novelist. Just write 50,000 words over the course of 30 days—a rate of roughly 1,700 words a day. Anyone age 13 or older can take part, which is perhaps why my first introduction to what its adherents call NaNoWriMo came through Tumblr, where every November 1 seemingly half of my dashboard disappeared overnight.   For 30 days and 30 nights, my mutuals tinkered away at their novels (and then snuck back onto Tumblr to complain about how hard that tinkering was). They asked me to yell at them if I saw them posting. And then, one by one, they gave up their novels and returned to replenishing my feeds with One Direction GIFs and essays on colonialism in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. Over time I got the impression that NaNoWriMo was more of a community-building enterprise than a pure literary one. I was never tempted to take part myself. Mostly out of laziness, but I was also never quite convinced that any novel I wrote in a month could be very good. And I had trouble swallowing the concept of participating in something as heinously named as NaNoWriMo.

I’m not sure Adam Sandler is capable of doing a bad set. Four decades into his career, I think he might be too much of a pro. Asking him to do stand-up badly would be like asking a master carpenter to make a chair badly. The work, after all those years, comes so naturally that doing it wrong would actually be harder. In his new stand-up special, Adam Sandler: Love You, it’s there in the title, that kind of glib “of course” quality—the dismissive way you say “love you” to a parent is the way you say it to Adam Sandler. Like, come on, of course. At a breezy one hour and 14 minutes, Love You is directed by Josh Safdie, the same guy who co-directed Sandler in Uncut Gems, and it opens with the same blue-lit, rain-drenched noir grit Safdie’s so good at coughing up, though perhaps this one rides less on frenetic anxiety than bustle. Nicolette Larson croons her 1978 hit “Lotta Love,” as Sandler, in full beard and sweats, appears behind a cracked windshield, driving up to an alley full of autograph seekers and entering a dive of a venue crowded with people with too many demands and too little time to have them honored (you might recognize a few of the non-actors Safdie used in Gems here). Various elements of the stage are falling apart, the monitors don’t work, and a dog shows up at one point—it’s a mess. It’s a cute contradictory conceit, the image of a journeyman comedian who is still willing to play a shithole (“Who booked this place?”) for the love of it, reminiscent of Sandler’s lifelong swindler in Gems. Except this is also one of the most famous comedians in the world worth many multiple millions—he’s signing Happy Gilmore jerseys backstage in this, his second Netflix special—no one would dare give this guy the wrong sweetener unless it was scripted. 

Isaiah Likely's toe-and-a-shade-more, in and of itself and ever so slightly over the line at the back of the end zone, does not have the same historical import of, say, Kevin Durant's in the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals. The Baltimore Ravens have 16 more games to prove their worth while those Brooklyn Nets went right to powersuck in a heartbeat, and by extension the Ravens could still affirm Lamar Jackson's place somewhere near the top of the universe. Observing the NFL has been reduced by its simpleton punditocracy to quarterbacks plus some other stuff, because the game itself is apparently too involved to make us think about more than just the one position. Every now and then, though, a big tight end’s big toe can be momentarily significant. The NFL’s rolling Chief Show was not what the audience wanted from Thursday night's season opener. It wanted Likely to have both feet fully inside the white paint so that the compelling game everyone received could go on a little bit longer. Probably not that much longer—even in that universe where Likely, the Ravens' Kelce-in-training, gets credit for the touchdown he surely had scored, the Ravens probably push it all in on a two-point conversion try that either wins or loses the game. That would have been an act of starkest clarity that made people think more fondly of Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, but it is also academic. The good news was that last night’s game was so compelling that we would have signed up for 10 more minutes of it. The bad news was that it ended in anticlimax. Likely's toe was a quarter-inch too prominent and so a spectacular denouement shriveled to referee Shaun Hochuli declaring that Likely's heroics weren't heroics at all, and that everyone would have to clear the stadium and their living rooms. It was that rare case where virtually all of America’s unaffiliated millions of viewers would have preferred the incorrect call.

Nothing about the way Iga Swiatek has played on hard court this season suggested that she'd be blown out, 6-2, 6-4, unable to keep the ball in the court in a strange and uneasy matchup.

The phrase “Caitlin Clark effect” saturates articles about WNBA broadcast rights and ticket sales, but I've been thinking about it more as an on-court phenomenon in the second half of the season.

I know how it goes by now. Sometime very close to the start of the NFL season, Drew and I welcome our buddy Kalyn Kahler, who is now at ESPN but is forever a part of the Defector team, onto the podcast to talk about which NFL teams will be good and which will be bad in the year to come. You can hear the 2022 version of this here, and the 2023 version of it here; this year's model is embedded below. These episodes are always a little longer than usual, and always somewhat rushed once things start bogging down around the AFC South. You may know its rhythms by now, too. Drew wants us to simply say whether a team is good or bad, and Kalyn and I, in very different but mostly equal ways, are just not people who really talk like that.