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To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way. I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely have children ... someday. But I was too transient and my career always took priority, so I just put off the decision. I crossed into my 30s and started to stare down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and knew that even though I still felt like a teenager who is woefully unprepared to be a parent, it was time to make a decision. It still felt like I didn't have enough information. When I was booking guests for the new season of Try Hard, I asked Anna Sale, the creator and host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money, if she had any major transformational moments that she wanted to talk about, and I was thrilled when she suggested the moment she became a parent.

Listening to Jeff Peterson, president of basketball operations for the Charlotte Hornets, talk about the recent LaMelo Ball trade, you get a pretty good idea of what he thinks about last season's team. "There's no doubt in my mind that we had a successful season last year, by a lot of people's standards, and of course LaMelo was a huge part of that," Peterson said, from Las Vegas, upon the formal completion of a deal announced nearly two weeks ago. Eager to sing the praises of the incoming Naz Reid, Peterson was also about as clear as decency could permit about what he seems to think of as the realistic limits of a Ball-led team. "These decisions are challenging, at times, but when you look at the totality of the season, and everything, of where we were, it's important to take an honest look in the mirror. The goal is never to compete for a play-in spot. The goal isn't to get to the play-in, or even to the playoffs for one year." The Hornets recovered from a wobbly start last season to finish with a winning record and make the East's play-in. They went on a tear after the All-Star break, finishing their campaign on a bonkers 30–12 run; Cleaning the Glass says they posted the NBA's seventh-best point differential on the season. Ball, healthy for the first time since his sophomore season in 2022, finished third on the team in minutes played, and the Hornets were about 7.5 points better by net rating when he was on the court, powered by an improvement in offensive efficiency of nearly 13 points per 100 possessions. It was Charlotte's best season by record since 2016; by Basketball Reference's dopey Simple Rating System, which combines point differential and strength of schedule, this was Charlotte's best season literally in franchise history. That accounts for the first part of Peterson's quote up there, the part about the Hornets having had a successful season "by a lot of people's standards" and LaMelo being a big contributor. As for the second part: The Hornets failed to sustain their momentum through the play-in, and their season ended in embarrassment. They needed a last-second go-ahead bucket in overtime to squeeze past a decimated Heat squad, and then three nights later they were summarily be-gibletted in Orlando by a Magic team so desperate to flush their season, fire their head coach, and hit the beach that they might as well have been playing in flip-flops and swim floaties.

There are four players in MLB with a higher bWAR than Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler, but nobody can hope to top him in PAR (pettiness above replacement). Last week, after he was left off of the All-Star Game roster, Wheeler struck out 14 batters to tie his career-best performance. To make it very clear where his motivation came from, after the game he called the All-Star selection policies “BS.” Wheeler turned his doubters into his outers at the pitching mound of success, but he’s not done.  The league listened to Wheeler’s comments, and Wheeler listened to me (as everyone should always). He made enough of a splash with his near-expletives, and his reminders sent to the people who need reminding, that on Friday the league offered him a spot on the All-Star Game roster. They may have thought that this would put the whole ordeal to bed. But that just shows how little the league understands true greatness.  Zack Wheeler knows his worth. He is an artist with the brush of spite in his hand. He cannot be placated with such disrespectful participation trophies. He will accept nothing less than greatness. Would Michelangelo be satisfied with painting only The Creation of Adam and not the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Imagine if Andy Warhol stopped at only one Marilyn. How different might the world be if Shakespeare never expanded past historical plays into the field of tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth? Naturally, Wheeler declined the invitation. He explained to reporters on Saturday, “They disrespected me, so I’m not going to participate.” He added that he didn’t want anyone to throw him a “pity party,” but that’s likely because he’s already been busy for the past week planning himself a petty party. 

Bryce Harper has finally provided an answer to the question of how he ended up helping FanDuel convince a problem gambler to lose more money. You may not be surprised to learn that Harper got himself into this sticky situation partly due to an inability to assign meaning to words. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a FanDuel bettor and gambling addict named Terry Thompson received a personalized video message from Harper that was sent to him by his FanDuel VIP manager, Bryttanni Morgan. The video featured Harper wishing Thompson and his family a happy Thanksgiving, and had the FanDuel logo superimposed on it. Harper released a statement on his Instagram account Monday, saying that he did not record the video in direct partnership with FanDuel, but to fulfill an order made by Morgan through his Cameo account. Harper said that Morgan did not place her order through the business video requests submission form provided by Cameo, and so therefore he could not have known that FanDuel would use it as a branded video message for one of its customers. "I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it," Harper said in his statement.

Conor McGregor came up lame literally one second into Saturday’s comeback bout with Max Holloway. To open a fight that the UFC claimed drew the biggest live gate in mixed martial arts history, McGregor rushed out of his corner and threw a flying kick with his left leg. The kick fell short of Holloway’s head by at least a foot, and then McGregor had a landing worthy of the "agony of defeat" guy, dropping to the cage floor in a heap without being touched. Then McGregor immediately got up and went at Holloway again with another left-leg kick that missed badly, and again fell down at the speed of gravity. In his first fight in five years, McGregor had knocked himself down twice in five seconds.    Holloway threw a few punches at his supine opponent, but clearly sensed something was off. He backed away and let McGregor rise. And McGregor quickly fell down again. Everybody watching the bizarre spectacle, including Holloway and referee Mike Beltran, seemed puzzled about how to handle these unforeseen and shocking events.  

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE OF FRANCE — They call it the diagonal of the void: the corridor running southwest to northeast across France where population density is significantly lower than elsewhere in the country. Explanations vary as to why, though after spending three nights in the void, I can confirm it feels empty here. Perhaps the spookiest sight was something I saw on the side of the road as we drove from Perigueux to Bergerac, on the side of a road in a village so quiet it may as well have been abandoned: what I believe to be a ham truck (pictured above). Scholars of the original text will recall the entirety of Dave McKenna's oracular sermon about ham trucks, but I am happy to bring newcomers and non-initiates into the fold. In our internal Slack, Dave insisted there were "ham trucks all over the roadsides" in the south of France; the hams were rotisseried, and often accompanied by "little ass potatoes." Nobody else had seen such a sight, many were skeptical of McKenna's claims, and his wife could not produce, when requested under oath, evidence of "any ham on the net." McKenna urged the Defector staff to "do the math"; Brandy Jensen asked a friend who lived in Marseille, who said it was possible; Dave McKenna responded, "lotta heroin in marseille"; we had a lot of laughs, and found no answers. I believe the vehicle I found in the diagonal of the void is a ham truck, the sort Dave described. The decorative castle outlining the truck suggests the meats cooked on its inner rotisserie are sold in some sort of festival-style gathering, or as part of a themed dining establishment of some kind. I think it's important to clarify that the rotisserie tongs on the apparatus are robust, the sort that could easily handle something larger than a chicken. Perhaps a pig.

You have one last job to do this Monday morning. This week's puzzle was constructed by Madison Shultz, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Madison has too many hobbies. She spends most of her free time skiing, climbing, hiking, and rockhounding, but started constructing crosswords in 2025 as a creative outlet and reason to stay inside more with her two cats. If you like this puzzle, you can find more of her work at her blog Crossword Curiosities. 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. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003, Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48. Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog-standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and privacy for anyone else. He hated the idea that the United States ought ever to be constrained by anything other than its own self-interest, as defined exclusively by guys like him. He hated the expectation that the United States would ever project its might with anything less than maximal imperial violence and bloodlust. He hated all of these with blithe good-ol'-boy cheer and the sneer of the frontrunner. He went on The Daily Show a bunch, so that both sides could playact a kind of broadminded comity that the suckers they both held in contempt just lap right up. Guh hyuk hyuk hyuk, isn't it charming how I want all of y'awl dead. For a little while in the aughts and again at intervals, Graham played at a kind of shriekingly insincere, cornpone Bible College John McCain act, pretending to part with his party on judicial nominees, on immigration reform, on gun control, on vaccines, when that fake disunity could be performed safely at the "sponsoring a doomed, dead-on-arrival bill" or "going on Meet the Press" stage and abandoned long before anybody had to cast a vote. Like many in his party, he pretended to care about decorum and civility when he thought Donald Trump was just a freak novelty act the establishment would eventually crush; like everyone in his party, he ditched that pretense as soon as the prediction turned out to be wrong. He spent the last decade of his life letting Donald Trump wear him as a glove, and telling himself it was the other way around. It bought him the war with Iran he'd worked for decades to make happen, and he fucked off the mortal coil before he could be made to reckon with it being a failure.

After losing the 2025 Australian Open final, Alexander Zverev was remarkably despondent. The man who defeated him, Jannik Sinner, put both hands on Zverev's shoulders and delivered a pep talk to the sobbing runner-up as the duo awaited the presentation of their trophies. "I think Jannik is better than me at the moment. It's as simple as that," Zverev said in his post-match press conference. "I think I'm serving better than him, but that's it. He does everything else better than me. He moves better than me, he hits his forehand better than me, he hits his backhand better than me, he returns better than me, he volleys better than me." Many players suffer emotionally after losing a Slam final, and for Zverev it was his third time in that unpleasant scenario, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd ever seen a tennis player sound quite so hopeless. Once a teenage prodigy, Zverev had endured the Big Three era only to be leapfrogged by Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. They beat him regularly, scooped up all the Slam titles that Zverev sought, enthralled fans, and played with the kind of relentless aggression that seemed to consistently elude Zverev in the nervy moments of a big match. At one point in April, the ranking points gap between No. 2 Alcaraz and No. 3 Zverev was larger than the gap between No. 3 Zverev and me. Nobody would dispute Zverev's claim that Sinner was a world apart from him. Frustration mounted, and late in the 2025 season, Zverev even speculated that tournament directors were tweaking their court surfaces to favor the Sincaraz duo. He has never been one for subtle grievance. Zverev turned 29 this April and must have felt he was running out of time. After all that heart- and bellyaching, this year Zverev lucked into a Roland-Garros draw unclogged of the tour's three most dangerous players: Sinner (shock loss due to cramps), Alcaraz (wrist injury) and Novak Djokovic (upset by rising star). It was in these somewhat Mickey Mouse circumstances that Zverev, the best of the rest, won his long-awaited first Slam. With that achievement under his belt, a few weeks later he rolled up to Wimbledon, advanced past the fourth round for the first time at the grass-court major, arrived at the final, won the first set in a tiebreak ... and still proceeded to lose to Jannik Sinner, 6-7(7), 7-6(2), 6-4, 6-4, on Sunday. We can grant that Zverev has made appreciable strides, with regard to his forehand and his execution under stress. He still can't yet threaten the regnant duo in men's tennis. This was Sinner's 10th consecutive win over Zverev.

It was Sunday night in Los Angeles, and the streets of the city legendary for its traffic sat empty. Even Trader Joe's—the beloved grocery chain known as much for its tiny parking lots as its low prices—had plenty of spaces. For once, as the Clueless joke goes, you really could get anywhere in LA in 20 minutes. The reason? Mexico was playing England. In the World Cup. In the knockout rounds. In the vaunted home of El Tri, Estadio Azteca. Well before I arrived at my local soccer bar, an hour before kickoff, I had resigned myself to being among those who had to stand outside. As I positioned myself the best I could for a view of the TVs, just another person clad in the signature green, white, and red of El Tri, I announced to no one in particular, "Oh thank God, the television is on Telemundo." I have been far from alone in this sentiment. For the Mexico match, Variety reported that 21.7 million people watched on Fox—while 23.2 million watched on Telemundo. More than half of the total audience watched the broadcast in Spanish.