NowLoop

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. Music's AI revolution has arrived, somewhat ... maybe. And naturally, it has come for rap first. This isn't the kind of trumped-up thing like what has been foretold in the roughly 100 weirdly written profiles about "AI actress" Tilly Norwood, a thing you've probably already forgotten about if you ever even heard about it in the first place. No, AI has been implemented in music production software, and it has officially gotten a real foot in the door of pop culture thanks to a very strange, very viral new hit song. https://youtu.be/qsKSfCCxrnk?si=MJMil-Fc9FD025Ht

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today. Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them. I realize this demographic distinction is crude, filled with exceptions, and only helpful up to a point, but I stand by it as a general heuristic. Personally, I’m a secondary source guy. I took a great deal of pleasure, for example, reading Frankenstein for the first time in English 101, but what I loved most was situating that text in an intellectual conversation that extended into the present. Discovering that Shelley’s creation was an answer to Malthusian theories of population, a critique of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, a conversation with Locke’s philosophy of mind—and thus a problem for contemporary discussions of feminism, humanism, eugenics, and colonialism—made the novel more interesting, more complicated, and more fun to read. None of those connections could have been made in advance of additional secondary reading; they aren’t points of data that, once established, now and forever adhere to the primary source; they are arguments whose coherence requires readers work their way through the recalcitrance of rhetorical language and construct those interpretive associations. To get there, to experience those distinct pleasures, you have to interact with secondary sources, and that sphere of cultural production hasn’t been faring so well in the popular imagination lately. 

"On one hand I resent it," Tim Layana told a reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel while watching a 44-year-old Steve Carlton throw a bullpen session at Yankees spring training in 1989. Layana, who was then 25 and had just reached Triple-A, would pitch in three big-league seasons for the Reds and Giants; Carlton was 44, had won four Cy Young Awards and 329 games. He was a veteran of 24 MLB seasons, an easy Hall of Famer, and identifiable as fully cooked from a hundred paces. The Yankees hadn't invited Carlton to spring training, and neither had any other MLB team. Carlton had made it into four games with the Twins in 1988, allowing 20 hits, five homers, and 18 earned runs in 9.2 innings. Yankees manager Dallas Green let him throw at Yankees camp as he rehabbed an elbow surgery and auditioned for a job with whomever might need a pitcher who could do what he did. The story describes Carlton wearing cutoff uniform pants as shorts, and an "an observer" remarking to the Yankees VP for player development that Carlton was "not throwing hard." From that point forward, Layana would be a better big-leaguer entirely by default; Carlton, whose agent had lost tens of millions of Carlton's dollars in bad investments, was trying to get one last job because he needed one, but would not pitch in MLB again. "I guess guys like him and Tommy John and Ron Guidry still have the dream to pitch in the big leagues, like we do who’ve never been there," Layana said, before acknowledging and explaining the resentment he felt about that. "I mean, they’ve had their time, now step aside and give somebody else a chance. But I can understand their desire. If I could still throw at their age, I’d wanna be competitive and try to get people out, too."

It is not news to you that the West Sacramento Athletics are deeply un-good. Even when they led the AL West in April and May, they somehow managed to do so while maintaining a solidly negative run differential. But since their last day at .500, on June 19, they have been, by both advanced and less-advanced metrics, Galactically Ass. Their three best hitters, Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, and Brent Rooker, are hurt, their pitching struggles to be shambolic, and as a result they have lost 35 of their last 44 games, a winning percentage of .205. Over a full season, that would be the fifth-worst in professional baseball history of any team that ever played a subsequent season, including the first year of the Phillies (1883), and five Negro League teams, including the New York Black Yankees, whose last six years were a cumulative 42-187. There. We spared you a gratuitous Cleveland Spiders reference. You're welcome. But while the A's have been baseball's foremost adherents of zombie baseball since that date, that is a role they have played before. More notable is the fact that they may have also gotten a few bites in against the best team in baseball in that span, the Boston Red Sox, simply through physical proximity. It is too early to say whether the Red Sox are showing signs of infection, but their recent stumbles are further proof that, as a general rule, it is poor hygiene to hang around the A's. The A's and their opponents should both be forced to wear masks, and if the owners weren't perfectly fine with an industrial pandemic that thins out the union membership, they would be.

Out of nowhere, and after only a few short days of negotiations, Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger have agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter for a reported record price of $12.5 billion. Every part of that sentence is wild, especially given the recent financial maneuverings of Walter and Kushner. Let's start with Walter, who bought the Lakers in June 2025 for $10 billion. Walter also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and has turned them into an organization so hyper-competent that it has made people who should know better argue for a salary cap in baseball. Walter's takeover of one of the NBA's flagship franchises was the most significant acquisition in a recent wave of sales that included the Celtics, Trail Blazers, and Timberwolves. As of the second half of this past season, Walter was beginning the process of replacing longtime functionaries of the previous ownership group, the Buss family. With Luka Doncic around, the long-term future of the team seemed secure. However, Walter's position was not as secure as it seemed. Bloomberg reported on July 20 that the federal government was conducting an investigation into Walter's Guggenheim Partners over some suspicious accounting. The heart of the issue is billions of dollars in private credit deals between companies within Walter's business empire. Private credit has been having a moment on Wall Street for a few years now, for the way the financing tool allows sprawling entities to move around money without as much regulatory scrutiny. At specific issue in this investigation, per the Wall Street Journal, is that nearly "$21 billion in loans extended to companies tied to Walter or his conglomerate, TWG Global, wound up on the books of insurance companies he owns after passing through a third entity." Insurance companies, in this case Delaware Life Insurance and Clear Spring Life, are subject to stricter regulations than many other financial institutions, because the money needs to be in place for when policyholders make claims.

All of us have that one friend who fully commits to the bit. And frankly, there is no better time in your life for taking new hijinks for an extended walk than the college years. But what if the bit was ancient Nordic weaponry?  Our friend of a friend today sets off to college with the axe of her dreams in hand—we do mean an actual axe—and together they forge an extravagant bond. She find community and minor fame, even love. But her boyfriend’s fondness for her axe quickly becomes excessive, and the cracks in their relationship only grow from there. "Axe boyfriend" has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anhHsMxIu68

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, Ray tackles a question about the merits of having an only child.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we welcomed back Maya Goldberg-Safir, one of my favorite WNBA writers and thinkers. Maya runs Rough Notes and has written a handful of amazing Defector stories, and I consider her to be the best person covering the history of women's basketball. On this episode, we talked about Maya's time at WNBA All-Star weekend in Chicago (which she wrote about for Bustle), the Sophie Cunningham situation, and the critical importance of understanding the past few decades of women's basketball history as a way into the controversies of today. We also did some trademark NBR meta-discourse and planned the Golden State Valkyries' championship parade. Also: Next week, we are doing a special Broke Jumper Tip Line episode, so please send in any stories you have about anyone notable interacting with basketball in any way! (347) 380-6426!

Let me cut right to it: Why can’t I get curry fries over here? Look, I just got back from a work trip to Dublin (where everybody says "Look" to start a sentence), and curry fries are weighing heavy. The trip went as swell as possible. I not only got to cover an all-timer of a football match, but also had my fill of curry chips, in the local parlance, just as I'd hoped and dreamed. Good god, they’re good. And they’re everywhere in the Irish capital. But upon returning, I got peeved by the lack of curry fries in my own country. How can something so ubiquitous and cheap and delicious over there be impossible to find stateside? We love fries: A 2025 study found the average American eats 17 pounds of 'em a year. Researchers found lots of love for curly fries; curry fries got nothing. I wasn't aware of any place in Washington, D.C., where I live, that sells curry fries. Yeah, OK, my editor may have located a pub that is 1.5 miles from house and serves curry fries shortly after I filed this, but what I truly desire is ubiquity. A huge part of the pleasure of my curry fry experience in Dublin was derived from knowing that the scrumptious snack was never far out of reach. Pubs, chip shops, food trucks—they were everywhere and all had what I wanted.

Some people are fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Tampa Bay Buccaneers. https://bsky.app/profile/profootballtalk.bsky.social/post/3mrurzuufhk2u