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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 bunk beds, working from home, good moms, undershirts, and more. Your letters: Michael:

After burning down an entire state's worth of bridges with his incredibly messy exit from Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin is now the head coach at LSU. The controversy surrounding his departure from Oxford did the impossible, making Kiffin's name even more infamous than it already was, and has put a massive spotlight on his first season in Baton Rouge. Ahead of that first season, Kiffin is out making the image-rehabilitation rounds, kicking things off with a Vanity Fair profile, in which the "still shaken" coach aims to tell his side of the fiasco in which he abandoned his team in the middle of a playoff run for a bigger school and a bigger contract. Kiffin centers his self-justification around the college football calendar, which is fair. As currently organized, the calendar really is absolutely fucked, requiring coaches and students alike to make major decisions about their futures while the season is still ongoing. There was no reasonable scenario in which Kiffin could've delayed taking the LSU job till Ole Miss's playoff run came to an end. But while it is kinda true that the calendar forced his hand, it's also kinda besides the point. You don't get an entire state to curse your name simply because you took a new job. What really riled up Mississippians is how his decision to move on, and especially the timing of it, demonstrated just how little regard he holds this program in. The move was straight out of the well-established Kiffin career playbook: Take over an underperforming program, march them to the cusp of the summit, then flee for greener pastures, all but explicitly stating that he sees the program's potential as maxed out. It makes for a wicked burn on the school in question. It hurt Tennessee when he did it to them back in 2010, and it hurts Ole Miss now. And it also reveals Kiffin's bone-deep belief that he could and should always do better, that coaching is purely transactional, and that the dreams he sells upon first getting the job about being in it for the long haul are just that: dreams. Of course, none of that is in the Vanity Fair profile. Instead Kiffin flips it around and argues that, actually, it was Ole Miss that lacked loyalty to him, or at least would have in some hypothetical future where Kiffin wasn't winning championships every other year or something:

With the score tied halfway through the fourth quarter of Monday night's Game 4 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Lakers, OKC's Ajay Mitchell sized up Marcus Smart in the left corner. The shot clock was rapidly draining and his teammates were all watched over closely, so it was up to the Belgian sophomore to cook the former Defensive Player of the Year. Mitchell gleefully obliged, crossing over so smoothly he sent Smart tumbling onto the hardwood, then crossing back over and leaping over Smart's prone body to finish in the lane. With their eventual 115-110 win, the Thunder survived the first close game they've had to play in these playoffs, and completed their second sweep in as many series. The Lakers lost the series by a total of 64 points, yet played about as well as could be expected of a misshapen team whose best player missed the entire series with a hamstring injury, second-best player was contending with an oblique injury, and third-best player is 41 years old. They kept it close through three quarters in most every game and, most impressively of all, held presumptive MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to a relatively unproductive quartet of games.

Remoras evolved to be clingy. The suction cup on their foreheads allows them to attach to larger animals like fridge magnets. Remoras hitch free rides on creatures of their choosing: sharks, rays, whales, dugongs, turtles, even parrotfish. But it has been traditionally assumed that the remora's approach to such symbiosis was mutually beneficial to both parties: The fish eat parasites off their hosts and slough off their dead skin, reducing the host's risk of disease, while all the remora requests is shelter under the enormous shield of their body and free transport to faraway ocean realms. And the fish feeds itself, scrounging on scraps from their host's meals and slurping up its feces. Sure, a hitchhiking remora or two makes a manta ray a little less aerodynamic. But the remora is so vanishingly small, and the manta ray so grandiosely big. Is this really such a big ask? Now, however, the tides are turning against the notion of the remora as a helpful, or even merely benign, fish, according to Emily Yeager, a PhD student at the University of Miami. "The narrative is shifting," Yeager said, and then proceeded to share an incriminating list of the remora's recent offenses. One 2025 paper found that sea turtles carrying one to three remoras grazed less. And in all their observations, the researchers only found a single example of a remora giving back and cleaning a turtle's shell. The strong suction of the fish's forehead can harm a host, and some remoras have been glimpsed entering their host's bodies. One 2023 paper collected observations of remoras wriggling inside the mouths, gill slits, and even the cloacae of whale sharks (cloacae being the preferred plural of cloaca, some animals' all-purpose holes for peeing, pooping, and birthing). Yeager is the author of a new paper that presents the strongest case yet for the remora as a pest. Yeager and colleagues have gathered evidence of remoras swimming inside the cloacae of manta rays, sometimes squeezing half their body inside a helpless ray's cloaca. The researchers have dubbed this behavior "cloacal diving," perhaps a more elegant term than the act deserves. The paper, published recently in Ecology and Evolution, tips the scales towards understanding remoras as potentially parasitic, and is one of the strongest arguments I've ever seen for the life-changing power of hands.

It’s almost quaint to read now, but author Lauren Weisberger spent the majority of her 2003 press tour for the release of The Devil Wears Prada trying to distance it from its obvious source material. “So much of the book is composed of stories from my friends,” she told Publishers Weekly at the time. “A lot of my girlfriends ended up in publishing and in magazines, or doing fashion PR or advertising. Horror stories are the same the world over.” Weisberger’s horror stories took place at Vogue, under the watchful eye of then-Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, who was widely considered to be the basis for the fictional tyrant Miranda Priestly of Runway magazine. In the years since, the book, the film, a musical, and the film sequel have become a cultural phenomenon that far outpaced any initial media gossip about its publication—to the point that over the past few weeks, surrounding the May 1 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Vogue itself has published dozens of stories pegged to it. But this embrace by the publication is a sharp shift from when the book first was released. Travel with me, if you will, back to 2003. At the time, Wintour’s party line regarding the book was carefully practiced in its casualness. A piece by David Carr for The New York Times, in which he outlined the moves she had made to keep Vogue ahead of the pack in terms of relevancy—which notably included putting celebrities on the cover at a time when models were the go-to—ends with this vignette:

The following is excerpted from The Long Game by Leander Schaerlaeckens, to be published on May 12, 2026 by Viking. It is available for purchase now. Velibor Milutinović, or Bora to both friend and foe, was born in Yugoslavia and orphaned by World War II. After a childhood spent kicking an inflated pig’s bladder around in the streets, he and his two brothers made the national team. He signed with clubs in Switzerland and France before winding up in Mexico. He became a successful coach there and then managed the Mexican national team. With an unconventional approach, he brought a moribund team to an improbable quarterfinal on its home soil at the 1986 World Cup, making him a Mexican hero. He was hired by Costa Rica just two months before the 1990 World Cup, dumped half a dozen of the team’s stars, and made it the first Central American nation to reach the World Cup’s second round. He was a certified miracle worker.

Cameron Brink came back to a very different team than the one she left in June of 2024, when she tore the ACL in her left knee in a game against the Connecticut Sun. That year's Los Angeles Sparks were firmly rebuilding—or, as veteran guard Lexie Brown described the young roster in training camp that year, "We're like little babies." Brink was one of the Sparks' two lottery picks; they'd used the other to select three-level scorer Rickea Jackson out of Tennessee. ACL recoveries are long, but the Sparks' front office didn’t exactly seem short on time. All spring, they had used telling words like "process" and "foundation." When Brink was injured, the Sparks were 4-11. She returned, in the middle of last season, to a new head coach and a new star teammate, on a team with some strange new ambitions. (Gone this year is Jackson, who was traded in the offseason to Chicago for 29-year-old guard Ariel Atkins.) These circumstances might explain a rough preseason and season opener this past weekend for the former No. 2 overall pick. The Sparks are in an awkward place: a "win-now" team that has yet to do any winning. So is Brink, an ostensible franchise cornerstone now coming off the bench, caught in the middle of her team’s pivot and her league's officiating shift.  Fouls have been an issue for Brink since she was a freshman in college. Her Stanford career ended with few signs of progress in this department. (Literally: She fouled out of her final collegiate game, Stanford's Sweet Sixteen loss to NC State.) The transition to pro basketball granted her one more foul to work with each game, and she has happily made use of it: She averaged around seven fouls per 36 minutes in each of her first two WNBA seasons.

NBR hall of famer Tom Krell, who claimed to have reached basketball nirvana when he joined the show for the playoff mega-preview with Tom Ley one month ago, is back for another appearance on the show this week. He briefly had that state tested when his Denver Nuggets went out like chumps, but he recovered enough to put in another all-time performance. Topics include: Christian Braun's facial hair, Anthony Edwards's heroism, fatherhood and the pursuit of romantic love vis-á-vis the two previous topics, the Mormonization of American culture, Adorno vs. Kierkegaard (in a basketball context), Darryn Peterson's apparent over-fondness for creatine, and so much more. Tom also shared a demo of a song he's working on under his stage name How To Dress Well that involves flipping a sample of Bones Hyland singing in his car on Instagram. This one's a banger.

In the summer of 2024, during the WNBA’s Olympic break, several Atlanta Dream players who weren’t competing in Paris had gathered for a midseason training camp of sorts. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a typical 3-on-3 scrimmage. In reality, it was anything but. The Dream weren’t playing in any ordinary gym, but rather in what might be the world’s most advanced basketball laboratory. Dream players ran across 87 subterranean force plates underneath the court, precisely tracking the force each player generated with their movements. Forty cameras, 20 on each side of the court, captured their movements; multiple optical tracking engines processed skeletal profile data based on the inputs. Ball and basket tracking technology monitored every shot’s arc, depth, and orientation in inch-perfect detail. Sensors sat in players’ waistbands and tracked granular movements like accelerations and decelerations. The setting was the Joe Gibbs Human Performance Institute in Charlotte, N.C., originally designed as a biomechanics-heavy recruitment and training hub for pit crew members for the Joe Gibbs NASCAR racing team. But the team quickly realized their facility had potential uses across sports, basketball chief among them. They purchased a wooden floor from the same company that makes the NBA’s, then outfitted the setup with tech typically reserved for actual laboratories.  

The sophomore slump is real, in the sense that rookies who have great seasons are rarely able to live up to such lofty expectations the following year, and fake, in the sense that it is hardly a phenomenon limited to rookies and sophomores. Rather, the sophomore slump is a manifestation of that accursèd phrase "regression to the mean": It is difficult for any baseball player, rookie or not, to follow up a great season, perhaps even an all-time great season, with something remotely resembling it. Which is to say that Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh was not going to dump 60 home runs all over this season like he did in 2025; the question was how much he would fall. The answer right now is: pretty damn far. Raleigh got off to a very poor start to the season, going 0-for-7 with seven strikeouts. This was very poor timing, as he had just drawn an outsized amount of attention for being a redass to his teammate Randy Arozarena during the World Baseball Classic; the whimsy of a given nickname is not enough to free Raleigh from resultant schadenfreude. But before the Seattle Mariners catcher could officially be renamed "Big Slumper" in certain private circles, he picked up his offensive production in April, returning to roughly the sort of hitter he was in the four non–60-homer seasons of his career: as always a pulled fly ball machine, though with overall offensive production hovering closer to 20 percent better than the average MLB hitter, rather than 60 percent. On April 27, Raleigh hit an eighth-inning home run against the Minnesota Twins. Since then—13 days, eight games, 36 plate appearances—he has not recorded a hit.