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Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In many ways, Tinashe's career thus far has been a road map for navigating the changing landscapes of music and the music business. As the product of the post-2000 melding of pop artists and hip-hop production—think Britney with The Neptunes, or Nelly Furtado with Timbaland—Tinashe first broke out in 2014, when she made a very classical style of club-first major label R&B. She had good singles, but the style of mainstream music she was making was falling out of fashion, replaced by a more alternative and insular style of pop R&B music, in the vein of Frank Ocean, SZA, Solange, and Brent Faiyaz. How we get from "2 On" to Tinashe's latest album feels legible but also completely unexpected. On Popstar, she defines what pop music for an internet age should be: club music that is postmodern and self-aware about living in an era of phones and people sitting on computers all day, while imploring them to get back outside. https://youtu.be/6JnGBs88sL0?si=Ia9Y4oR8oFI_k8vN

Elon Musk reportedly spent nearly half a billion dollars on the 2026 election, all of it going toward the effort to keep Donald Trump and the Republican Party in control of the entire U.S. government. He failed, of course; by now you've seen that the midterms turned out to be one of the most dramatic wave elections in living memory, flipping both houses of Congress and innumerable state offices to the Democrats. And so, on the one hand: Ha ha ha! You fuckin' loser! Eat shit! On the other hand, this made no appreciable dent in Musk's personal wealth. His net worth at most recent estimate sits somewhere in the neighborhood of $860 billion. The 55-year-old Nazi-saluting CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who occupies his free time posting calls for race war, could dump half a billion dollars on each of the next 16 elections in a row before he had spent one percent of his wealth. The world's richest individual spent, relative to the amount he can afford to spend, virtually no money at all. He can try this again, and he will, at larger scale and with better planning and more numerous redundancies. Unless.

A 4K re-release of Sylvester Stallone’s uplifting 1976 boxing classic, Rocky, will roll out across American cinemas this November to mark the film’s 50th anniversary. As will Peter Farrelly’s likewise uplifting making-of biopic, I Play Rocky, starring Anthony Ippolito (fresh off playing Al Pacino in the Godfather making-of biopic The Offer) as a young, hungry Stallone, warring with naysaying studio heads who don’t want him to play Rocky. Stallone himself is releasing The Steps, a memoir of his youth, his rise to Hollywood stardom, his lifelong love affair with abstract impressionist painting, the triumphant making of Rocky, and his more frustrated efforts to get a biopic of (of all people) Edgar Allan Poe greenlit.  Philadelphia, the Italian Stallion’s ancestral home, will host the “Rocky Steps Challenge,” which sees competitors racing up the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps. (All entrants will receive a commemorative Rocky headband.) The Philadelphia 76ers hosted a “Rocky Night” on November 2. Gulp down a tall glass of eggs and take your best gal to the zoo, folks. America has Rocky Fever. Yet all the hubbub around Rocky risks distracting from another, only-slightly-less significant anniversary. Although 2026 may be the big 5-0 for the Oscar-winning Rocky, which is arguably one of the greatest sports movies of all time, it also marks the 41st anniversary of 1985’s Rocky IV, which is itself arguably, well … one of the sports movies of all time. 

Aspiring politician Vivek Ramaswamy broke his lifelong vegetarianism Tuesday night, eating a fat one in the Ohio gubernatorial race where he ran as a Republican against Democratic candidate Amy Acton. It's certainly a vexed time to try and court a right-wing audience as a Hindu and Indian-American candidate. Let's wind back the clock and see how that strategy worked out for him over the past few years. Recall the promising origins of Ramaswamy's political consciousness: biotech executive abruptly turned critic of the "modern woke-industrial complex." With the release of his 2021 book Woke, Inc. and his unfortunate slide into public view, he offered the country a strain of sleazy, technocratic Trumpism. Even as he opposed the scourge of identity politics, he seemed not to realize that he himself would soon be subject to them. From the start of his national prominence, Ramaswamy has tried to make his Hinduism more palatable and relatable to his fellow travelers. This was a throughline of his 2024 presidential campaign as a Republican. "The lessons learned being Hindu were similar and in many ways overlapping with Judeo-Christian values like sacrifice, performing your duty without attachment to the results and believing that your work on this Earth is not being done by you, but through you,” he said in a 2023 interview with the Associated Press. The article, paraphrasing Ramaswamy's views, noted his belief that "Hindu values seem to resonate with Christian and Jewish audiences." Shockingly, Ramaswamy's political instincts might have led him astray on that front. He suspended his presidential campaign in January 2024. In May of that year, after a Republican candidate debate, Ramaswamy hosted conservative commentator Ann Coulter on his own podcast, where she expressed a view that was undoubtedly prevalent among his hypothetical voter base. Ramaswamy voluntarily promoted that episode by saying that Coulter "told me flat-out to my face that she couldn’t vote for me 'because you’re an Indian,' even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back." Here, he adopted his signature pose: groveling to people who plainly hate anyone who looks like him, under the pretense of accepting their tough ideological disagreements. He would later face similar attacks from Coulter's millennial and Zoomer spiritual successors, Laura Loomer (who criticized him for opening America's borders to "third-world invaders") and Nick Fuentes (who said he'd rather see a Democrat win than Ramaswamy).

The Philadelphia Eagles just announced that one-game Patriots legend Joe Milton will be starting for them on Sunday afternoon. This firecrackershell news raises a few questions: 1) Did you know that Joe Milton was even on the Eagles roster before just now? Because I didn’t. 2) Would you rather have Joe Milton at the controls than any of the quarterbacks currently at the Ravens’ disposal, a fresh-off-the-plane Jacoby Brissett included? Because I think I might. Lastly, does this make the Eagles the saddest, most pathetic team in the NFL at midseason? Well now, there’s an alarmingly large number of sadboy teams vying for that honor right now. And only All Ball can give you a definitive answer. Roll the tape! https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/0d47442c-f823-4f04-9da0-4e85145d06d8 Is that all? Pfft. Hardly. Arif Hasan and I recorded this episode on Election Day, well before the returns started to come in. So after briefly sharing our personal hopes for the night (wishes granted), we then pivoted right to the football stuff. We contemplated whether or not the Jeffery Simmons-ized Bears are now the best team in the league, we had a real doctor write in to illuminate Philly’s (mis)handling of its primary non-Milton QB, and we lavished undiluted praise upon the Jacksonville Jaguars for their killer alt uniforms (they’re also a very good team). We also previewed a Week 9 slate that’s even worse than Haley Stevens’s future employment prospects. Bleak shit.

I was raised under a big sky, on a long flat prairie. As a child, my parents taught me to stick out my tongue when anyone said the name "Bill Clinton." Everyone I met, everyone I knew and loved for my whole entire childhood, was a Republican, except for the few libertarians. Sure, people may have grumbled about our invariably Republican elected officials—be it Bush or Perry or Abbott—but they still voted for them. Republicans ruled Texas in the same inexorable way the sun rises each morning. The alternative was basically unthinkable. Until last night, when all of a sudden it wasn’t. I knew the place where I grew up was changing. But as the returns came in Tuesday night, I felt like I’d been hit by lightning. Steve Kornacki pointed at my home county, Denton, and declared that James Talarico was up by almost 13 points in the early returns. That margin wouldn’t stay, but the lead did. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Talarico won Denton County with a little over 53 percent of the vote. And it wasn’t just him. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, took Denton County by a narrow margin. Both took the state.  They were not alone. In every statewide race in Texas, the Democratic candidate won. As Forrest Wilder wrote in Texas Monthly on Wednesday, “It seems like Texans went into the voting booth with a vengeance, voting against anyone with an R next to their names.” In addition to the national Senate seat and the governor’s mansion, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has been an incredibly adept and evil politician my entire adult life, got destroyed by Vikki Goodwin. Democrats won the attorney general’s office, the comptroller, the railroad commissioner, and the fucking agriculture commissioner. They flipped suburban counties, including Paxton’s own home county of Collin.

In the lead-up to an inevitable springtime lockout, Major League Baseball has revised the salary cap-and-floor plan it first proposed back in July. The significance of these details is different from sports leagues that already have salary caps, where the numbers are the point. In MLB the fight concerns whether a salary cap will exist at all, with ownership offering up version after version of what a cap could resemble, and players ostensibly declining, baseball bat in hand, until the basic yes-or-no question has been answered. The latest version, proposed by MLB on Nov. 3, would delay the implementation of a cap from 2027 to 2028. This is less a concession to players than it is to teams, giving them a full offseason to prepare rather than launching into a cap system immediately after a lockout. The new numbers offered by MLB are projections, contingent on league revenue, which presumably will change dramatically in '27 depending on the duration of the lockout. To simplify, the proposed projected cap would sit at $258.2 million, and the floor at $180.2 million, or at about 70 percent of the cap. This would, in theory, work out to players receiving a 50-50 percent split of league revenue. But like all cap systems, the finer details are contingent on how revenue is collected and how spending is defined.

Almost every day is a tradeoff between satisfaction and punch-bowl turds. Find a great parking spot in front of the place you want to go? There's a ticket on the windshield when you return. Good work review from the boss? Unpaid overtime the night before a holiday weekend. Winning at the card table? The last hand brings a bad beat that reallocates your winnings to someone else. When Devin Cooley received congratulations for a good game in goal for the Calgary Flames two years ago, he famously said, "Nothing's really gonna matter. We're all gonna die." Even now, he is among the most famous hockey players to non-hockey fans for that fascinating worldview. That fame, and that darkly realistic approach, didn't prevent him from getting injured last week. But Tuesday was that rarest of events—a grand day in politics. The reigning goblins got routed in nearly every way and seemingly every race, although meat slab impersonator Tommy Tuberville still won his Alabama governor's race and Mark Teixeira narrowly won his congressional race. It was great on its face, and also for all the devastated expressions that came with those losses; it is a good day when all the worst people are sad. Very nearly as satisfying, the Canadian government committed itself to a decision that made Prime Minister Mark Carney look as good as the election down here must have made him feel. Carney stood strong in the face of Canada's national addiction, hockey, to tell the Court of Arbitration for Sport to take a hike on its decision to allow Russia to play in the World Juniors Tournament that begins the day after Christmas in Edmonton and Red Deer, Alberta. Nearly half the 16 nations scheduled to play in the world championships in Germany in May have also said they won't participate if the Russians are allowed.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Dave offers guidance on how to solo parent when your spouse is away.

Haley Stevens was not on the ballot in Michigan, because the outgoing House rep had already lost her Senate bid in the Democratic primary back in August. But with a sudden burst of ineptitude reminiscent of the 2000s Detroit Lions, she found a novel way to lose on Tuesday. The 43-year-old from the suburbs—clearly still raw from the fact that Abdul El-Sayed beat her despite all her money, perhaps also mind-alteringly horny for her fiance Jason Turkish—made a shock endorsement of the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, at the 11th hour. This choice, the logic of which Stevens could not articulate even given many chances, made her as welcome among Democrats as Ron Artest at a Pistons home game. It also paid off about as well as the Tigers' 2017 Justin Verlander trade, with El-Sayed beating Rogers like Michigan basketball beat UConn. Haley Stevens in 2026 has officially tied the '08 Lions' record for fewest wins in a year: zero. To close her multi-day display of bizarre vindictiveness and sudden paranoia, Stevens made a decision that's especially easy to laugh about: the hat. While trying not to bump into her mother on the sidewalk on their way to vote, Stevens spoke into the news camera about—I don't know, probably stickin' it to 'em or something. I was too distracted to listen, owing to her humongous beige headgear.