NowLoop

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified, but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day, or to the fact that she did all that only to be outsung, and in some quarters, almost entirely eclipsed by Houston’s cover. I know that I saw a variation on that tweet a couple of times before I actually sought out Parton’s original recording. I remember finding it a bit boring. The story goes that “I Will Always Love You” was written as a sort of parting gift to Parton’s mentor Porter Wagoner, who introduced Parton to the world in the ’60s on his long-running nationally syndicated musical variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. The two worked together through the late ’60s and early ’70s before Parton decided to do what she came to Nashville to do: become her own star. In a stripped-down 2009 performance, Parton recounts how Wagoner took the news: “When I started working with Porter, I told him I had come to Nashville to be my own star and to have my own group. But the money was so good, I told Porter I would stay for five years. And he agreed to that. Well, five years came and … I told him I wanted to go out on my own. He was just having a fit about it. We argued a lot and I thought, He’s never going to listen to me. He’s not hearing a word I’m saying … So, I went home, wrote a song about it, came back the next day and I said, ‘Porter, just sit down, let me sing you something, then you’ll know how I feel.’”

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair.  Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relationship to femininity that I found, in turns, inspiring and confounding. Inspiring because she was always in on the joke—“it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”; “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde”—and confounding because I would find myself thinking, Doesn’t she ever get tired of having to be in on the joke? I’ve never had a particularly vexed relationship with my gender, but I do sometimes find the outward trappings tiring. Possibly this is because there are certain parts of it I’m just not very good at. Style has always been a thing that other people are able to have while I—no matter how much effort or money I expend—kind of just wear clothes. Every once in a while I’ll watch makeup tutorials on Instagram and get annoyed ping-ponging between the women showing me how to do a “no-makeup makeup look” who don’t actually need to wear any makeup, and the ones who approach it with the kind of rigor one might more readily associate with big engineering projects. I realized years ago that having very long hair is an easy way to avoid ever having to learn what to do with it, and so when I tip my head back my hair touches my ass. 

Like all people not gravely deficient of soul, I teared up a little when I heard Dolly Parton died. I am by nature something of a patch of soft pavement—easily impressed upon—and so there’s not much surprising here. What was odd came a bit later when, attending to the funerary rites proper to these exhaustingly online days, I scrolled through one performance after another. There was an inner tumult, an upwelling excess. Soon enough I wasn’t merely damp-eyed; I was choked up; I snuffled; I was, you would have to say, losing some real quantity of my shit. Here’s the odd part: More or less the whole time I was thinking of my mom, an Italian-American lady from the East Coast in her middle-80s who is very much alive, and isn’t much at all like Dolly Parton. Except, perhaps, for how she is.

Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here. Normal business resumes on Monday. Onward.

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in a stormy emotional moment, by rotating the concept of a guy who hits .217 with 34 homers in their mind—than it does for Reds fans. Recent Reds seasons each contain a high potency of Guys. Scott Schebler hit 30 homers for the Cincinnati Reds in 2017; he was done in the Majors by 2021, when he struck out in half of his 34 plate appearances with the Angels. Scooter Gennett and his Universal Baseball Association-ass name hit 27 homers for that team as well. Adam Duvall hit 31, Zack Cozart 24. They won 68 games. This is just what the Reds have been like: bad, loud, and weird. Duvall had a solid but bizarrely intermittent career; Schebler and Cozart were never good big-leaguers again, although they were both inevitably Angels before it was all over. By 2019, they had been replaced by another wave of Reds Guys. Yasiel Puig, already careening down the shoulder of his MLB career at age 28, hit 22 homers for the team that year. Derek Dietrich hit 19, and finished with a delectable .187/.328/.462 slash line. We used to make things in this country. That team won 75 games. All of the above are Reds Guys. All teams converge toward the mean over time, and moving into the dinger-positive Great American Ball Park in 2003 made the Reds notably more like this by dint of that home stadium's dimensions. But it goes back further than that. Players who dodged the beefy turds of Marge Schott's untrained dogs at a previous Cincinnati ballpark—Glenn Braggs or Kal Daniels or whoever you like—are all part of the long lineage of players who mashed some taters to no great effect for otherwise unremarkable Reds teams. That they were all literally Reds guys does not diminish the extent to which they were, vibrationally speaking, Reds Guys. If Three True Outcomes icon Adam Dunn is something like the prototypical Reds Guy in terms of half-empty and mostly thwarted thump, he is also standing on the shoulders of giants with unsustainable swing-and-miss rates.

Two things are true about me: I hate rich people and I love architecture. These days that presents a terrible contradiction, because only the extremely rich are able to finance the perpetuation of architectural production, whether in the form of new and interesting houses or in the financing of skyscrapers and grand, expensive public-facing private projects like museums or concert halls. Meanwhile places like schools or libraries are cash poor, public resources like parks or housing are privatized, and much of what remains of the political infrastructure that ushered in the 20th century’s great social programs is as decrepit as some of the buildings, bridges, and roads they’ve left behind.  For about two or three years now, it’s become increasingly difficult to know what to say about architecture, honestly, even though writing about it is my very privileged job. It’s one thing to write “We need an architecture that serves the people, not one that’s a mere bauble for the ruling class” over and over, but as the years roll on, my belief that such a thing is possible is beginning to wear quite thin. This is for a number of reasons, the least of which is the deteriorating political situation in the United States writ large, but perhaps the main one is that the ideological dynamism of the 2010s within architecture (and without) has largely stalled. What has taken its place is either the continued perpetuation of the digital tech-brained “floating cities will solve climate change” way of thinking, whose origins begin in the ’90s and have never stopped (as evidenced by the immediate embrace of AI), or a kind of resignation to the status quo—a pretty building every once and a while, a small library by Jeanne Gang or whatever, and then mostly faceless skyscrapers, luxury apartments, whatever pays the bills or makes an interesting shape that distinguishes itself from all the other interesting-shape buildings. As you can see, I am very depressed.  Recently, I was in Europe hoping to catch those familiar whiffs of a world that is still mostly bad but slightly better than the one we have here. I hold no delusions about some kind of EUtopia; I was simply hoping to encounter buses that run on time, generally pro-social features like public bathrooms, and good bread. Mostly this turned out badly for me. In Berlin, AfD signs littered flagposts (it is election season), and half of the museums were closed for renovations that will take seven years because the city has no money. 

Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel, the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye, and the eternal frown of the sea toad. These spooky fish's great and insurmountable distance from us might offer some reassurance that we are not likely to encounter them in the wild, at least not while either of us is alive. But the world's weirdest-looking fish, at least in my estimation, does not live in the deep sea. The red-lipped batfish trudges in the sludge near the Galápagos Islands, no deeper than 250 feet, which means it is a fish that people are able to encounter in the wild, perhaps even on a special vacation. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to see a red-lipped batfish in the wild without prior knowledge of the species. I have known about the red-lipped batfish for at least a decade now, and each time I see a photo of the fish I still feel the need to blink, to remember that the fish is, indeed, real, to ask myself for the millionth time, What the hell is going on with that fish? Let me show you what I mean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6gp-ACJK6g

Redheads feel your pain. And then some. I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor. See, I must’ve flinched more than the Hopkins doc thought I should when she commenced to burn my flesh, because she stopped the procedure to ask, “Did you used to be a redhead?”

Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtMFDcAprg

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: College football is back! Sort of! Week 0 exists in a strange reality all its own. It is not preseason, as its games are real and important, and yet the vast majority of teams will not be playing during it. Week 0 is therefore an imaginary weekend of real football, but if any sport values the power of imagination, it is this one. Imaginary championships. Imaginary rivalries. Imaginary rules, ethics, and college classes. Even imaginary conferences, like the Pac-12. It's a sport filled with creative silliness. Speaking of imaginary things, the 2026 season hasn't even officially started and it's already filled with drama. Louisiana has ruled that guys who recently left school and got cut from NFL rosters can reenlist in college. The big conferences are already colluding to nip this potentially imaginary new rule in the bud, so it's no surprise that Lane Kiffin has sprinted in to take advantage before it disappears. It wouldn't be this sport if things weren't an absolute mess.