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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 about sex, tiny shrimp, doinks, and more. Before we get to today’s proceedings, let's all give a warm round of applesauce to Lauren Theisen for guest-hosting this column last week so that I had more time to work on a big feature that I still have yet to finish. Cheers to Lo, jeers to yours truly. Also, I've yet to plug our new NFL podcast in the Funbag, so let me correct that right now. Arif Hasan and I have a new podcast called All Ball! It's all about NFL football, with no gambling or fantasy shit getting in the way! So email us all of your serious NFL questions right here, and get in on that shit. Got it? Nice. Let's get down to business then.

There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love, about how all contemporary fantasy is written under the influence of The Lord of the Rings. “Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints,” Pratchett wrote. “Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.” I think this holds true for all genre fiction; there are giants of the genre, who introduced basically all of the tropes, fully formed, and anyone working in that genre is constantly in conversation with those tropes. Every ghost story is in communion with Henry James; every haunted house owes a debt to Shirley Jackson. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Cliches become cliches for a reason, and it can be rewarding as a reader to spot the influences. We are primed to expect the expected, just by picking up a ghost story in the first place. “Ghost stories might not all use the same words,” Malerman has one of his characters observe, “but they all sound like the same words because it’s the ghost we think about, not the words.”

What was your favorite video review controversy at this past summer's World Cup? Was it when Egypt had the best goal in their history disallowed for a foul committed by an unrelated guy 15 seconds before the big moment, when Iran lost to that same Egypt side over a totally fake offsides call, when the mouth-covering red card rule was applied against a Paraguayan player but not against an England player, or when Donald Trump personally lobbied FIFA to get a red card against Folarin Balogun rescinded? It's hard to choose from such a bounty of options. The 2026 World Cup represented a nadir in the evolution of soccer as theatrical product, with interminable replay reviews bringing the action to a halt in the name of adjudicating decisions that a referee couldn't possibly make. The world has been told that the death of theater is the price of fairness. I hate this stuff, especially because VAR is wrong all the time. The counterargument would be that without VAR, referees would miss even more stuff and that the world would see big, consequential calls get blown without the ability to review them. On this week's episode of Only If You Get Caught, we examine the most famous missed call in the history of soccer as a way of making the argument against VAR. Our show is often accused of being pro-cheating, which is usually mistaking curiosity for endorsement. But in this case the charges are correct: We absolutely love the Hand of God.

Paul Pierce claims he's having trouble making ends meet. The extraordinarily divorced Celtic great and occasional television bomb-out is paying a cumulative $48,000 per month in child and spousal support to at least two women, per court documents obtained and reported by TMZ. That is a lot of money. His ex-girlfriend Princess Santiago, with whom Pierce engaged in a public and nasty paternity dispute, is reportedly asking a court to award her another $40,000 in legal fees, and for $10,000 to hire a forensic accountant. She suspects that Pierce has been dishonest about his resources. Per TMZ, Pierce filed paperwork in response to this request, claiming that he is broke and "drowning" under his financial obligations. Some of Pierce's trouble comes from job instability. Pierce lost a well-paid ESPN gig in 2021 after posting selfie videos to social media from a profoundly grim house party. Pierce later insisted that he did not regret the tragic scene, or regret posting the video of it, and didn't really even regret losing his job at ESPN, a situation that he said had already become strained. It took him three years to land another network gig, but Pierce filled some of the time filming grim livestreams with Kevin Garnett in a deal with sports gambling outfit BetMGM. In March 2024, Pierce was brought on at Fox Sports 1 as a basketball analyst; per TMZ, his contract with FS1 paid him $1.5 million annually. He started as a contributor on Skip Bayless's Undisputed; when Bayless departed and Undisputed folded, Pierce joined Joy Taylor and Keyshawn Johnson as co-hosts of the show Speak. That also blew up, in July 2025, when Taylor was jettisoned and Speak was cancelled. It seems like Pierce was still collecting some of this sweet FS1 income into this year, per documents from his latest divorce, reported by TMZ back in July. According to those documents, Pierce was hauling in about $165,000 per month for the first half of 2026, although some of this income was from various side deals; you know damn well Pierce was being paid by an online sportsbook.

It's bad enough that Pat McAfee is so omnipresent and obnoxious, but does he also have to be so thin-skinned? ESPN's prize hog used Monday's episode of his daily talk show to complain about what a bad experience he had at the University of Utah when he was there for College GameDay this past weekend. More specifically, McAfee was aggravated because the school had posted a video (now deleted) in which a couple of students were prompted to do an impression of him. "He's gonna say a corny line," said one student who was predicting McAfee's GameDay pick. "He's gonna be like, 'Houston, we got a problem. Gimme the Utah Utes.'" For the record, McAfee picked the visiting Cougars in Saturday's game, but Utah won, 21-13. Another student mocked McAfee for his well-worn bit of taking off his shirt on set. "Bro, Pat, we love you, bro, but keep the shirt on. No one's trying to see that. We don't care. These are college kids, bro. Keep your shirt on, homie." I have to admit: These youthful Utes had him dead to rights.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were once again joined by the great Liz Franczak of the great TrueAnon podcast to talk through some stories from the first week of the NBA season. Right before we had Liz on the show last year, the big NBA gambling bust happened, and we were once again blessed with a stinky new story breaking hours before recording. This time, it was the NBA's announcement that the league had partnered with both Kalshi and Polymarket. Liz is also a huge Golden State Warriors fan, and we dedicated most of the episode to complaining about how they've been left behind by the way the game has changed over the past decade. Like all our Liz episodes, this one's a real banger.

On a hot summer day in August 1972, actor-turned-documentarian William Greaves orchestrated a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home. He invited the surviving architects of the Harlem Renaissance and encouraged them to bask in impassioned discussion of the history and legacy of that period. Greaves, along with his son David and two other cameramen, captured 60,000 feet of film of the entire event. Throughout the remainder of his life and career, he wrestled with how to use the footage. At one point he hoped to use it in the award-winning documentary From These Roots (1974), but instead decided to set it aside, giving it room to breathe. Greaves died in 2014 at the age of 87, with the raw footage still unfinished and fragmentary. His son, David, and granddaughter, Liani, then took up the mantle of this important restorative project. They were helped in this effort by Greaves’ widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, who preserved and safeguarded the archive with a grant from the Ford Foundation until her death in 2023.  Shot on 16mm, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a work of historical immersion animated by the very participants of one of the most influential eras in cultural history. Over the course of the documentary, the surviving members of a once-vibrant community of Black artists, poets, musicians, and writers from the 1920s—now senior citizens, dressed in their Sunday finest—recollect, reflect, and contest each other's memories and anecdotes of a period in which they not only lived but helped define. By interlacing the party scenes with other interviews conducted by William Greaves, archival material, literary texts, and cultural iconography, David resurrects the Renaissance period they all gathered to recall. Cinema becomes a vault for Black oral histories, to be passed down for generations to come.    Born and raised in Harlem to a working-class Caribbean family, William Greaves grew up at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. At the behest of his religious parents, he was introduced to Black performance, poetry, culture, and radical histories. In his younger years, Greaves performed in African dance troupes. He later became interested in acting and worked with the American Negro Theater before transitioning into radio, television, and film. In an interview with the film scholar Scott MacDonald, Greaves recalls an epiphany about discovering the works of pioneering independent Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: 

In the top of the fifth inning of Monday's Game 3 of the World Series, Milwaukee captain Christian Yelich hustled into second base off a ground ball hit by William Contreras. He was called out on the field, ending the half-inning. The play looked well worth a challenge, but with two outs, I still decided that it would be a good time to take a shower. When I came out of the shower, the Brewers had scored eight two-out runs, extending their lead to 10-0. It went like this: single, single, double, double, single, double, flyout. Then the Rays just had to play through the rest of the game to get to the next one, where they will be fending off a sweep. https://youtu.be/y_06drhyWDI The first two games of the series showcased the Brewers' historic skillset as pesky fighters who never go away. Neither of their starters, Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson, were at their best; Game 1 featured some uncharacteristic wobbles in the fundamentals from both teams, and Henderson gave up four runs in the first inning of Game 2. Each game featured some ninth-inning weirdness, with Game 1 ending after a video review and smoke on the field from some overeager celebratory fireworks, and Game 2 ending on an unreviewable checked-swing call with the top of the Tampa Bay lineup up to bat.

When the Miami Heat traded for Giannis Antetokounmpo this past summer, I started to imagine a fourth championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard. Here's a top-five player, a perennial MVP candidate, and he's coming to Miami. Wow, great, love it! Sure, the Heat gave up pretty much every asset it had aside from Bam Adebayo to make the trade work, and there were roster issues galore heading into the season, but still. Giannis! Antetokounmpo! How could this fail? It simply couldn't! Anyway, Miami lost to the Dallas Mavericks on Monday night and dropped to 0-4 for the season. Worse than that, the team has looked lost and overwhelmed in every single game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxNf1bBs6o

The story begins with a man fixated on the idea of a German shepherd, which was first bred for its wolf-like appearance and obedience as a worker. He is less invested in the dog as an animal as he is in the dog as a symbol of loyalty and obedience, always valuable traits under an authoritarian regime. He is also interested in tinkering with the dogs to hone them as weapons of war. I am speaking, of course, of the American entrepreneur Ben Lamm, one of the founders of the new defense technology company Warhound, which has raised $200 million in funding to create genetically modified dogs for the U.S. military, and law enforcement. The promotional art for Warhound is laughably fascist, featuring several German shepherds garbed like Tier 1 operators. They wear tactical vests and protective sunglasses and helmets. Two of the dogs are totally white for reasons that are unclear but also unsettling. I've written about Lamm before, and the gripes I have with his most famous startup, Colossal Biosciences, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible pursuit of its promise to "de-extinct" the mammoth and other flashy prehistorics, despite being dishonest about what "de-extinction" really means. Although I did not predict Colossal's next outlandish project would rise to the bar of "genetically modified murder dogs," I can't say I'm surprised. In classic Colossal fashion, these war dogs do not exist yet. Also in classic Colossal fashion, the company has promised a short timeline: puppies early next year and dogs in military service in two years.