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Steve Belichick has resigned from his job as defensive coordinator at UNC following an investigation that found "certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina's values and standards of conduct," according to a statement released Thursday by the university. Belichick, the son of head coach Bill Belichick, already had been on medical leave. This follows Mike Lombardi resigning earlier this month from his job as general manager. Little else has been made public by UNC about what led to Lombardi and Steve Belichick's resignations. The university's statement described "a thorough and independent investigation into allegations related to culture and climate within the Carolina football program." It went on to say that the investigation found that what happened was "isolated in scope and not a systemic failure."

Rory Dames—the women’s soccer coach currently banned for life from the NWSL, and who has been accused of abuse by more than a dozen former youth players—is no longer listed in the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s centralized disciplinary database. According to a document reviewed by Defector, Dames was removed from the database because a one-year suspension by SafeSport has ended. Per the document, he remains on probation for five years and under a no-contact directive, but those sanctions do not limit his involvement in soccer. The document did not say if his probation started after his suspension ended, or if it ran concurrently. A person who was interviewed for SafeSport’s investigation told Defector they were informed about the sanctions against Dames on July 28 of last year, at which point the former coach and SafeSport were already embroiled in a legal battle. The interviewee was therefore under the impression that the decision was not final, and that the one-year suspension had not started yet.

Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent. But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work."

There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in a 2025 New Yorker column.  Over the years, Trump’s been called a number of epithets. Cruel, heartless, old, stupid. There remains a collective nervousness around calling Trump a fascist, and few writers avail themselves of words like “evil.” Susan Neiman has been interested in the problem of evil for most of her career as a moral philosopher. Her 2002 book, Evil in Modern Thought traced the history of philosophy as a matter of different responses to the existence of evil. So it’s surprising that her latest book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, is curiously cagey about the current President’s alignment.  Neiman has written multiple books about theodicy, the problem with woke culture, and why progressives would benefit from more moral clarity.  Her new book allows her to play the hits under a provocative title, but with little novelty. She never quite gets around to taking on Trump directly despite the little book’s title. Across seven chapters, Neiman considers the importance of discussing morality, the empty ideology the Trump admin has used to justify its actions, and how we must shift away from identity politics and liberalism and towards socialism. She argues that the left has ceded moral ground by claiming materialism instead of ideology—though her thinking about both seem muddy. Her ideas about ideology contain a lot of materialism and her ideas about materialism are undergirded by ideology. She dives into the discourse with a lot of cynicism around Marx, communism, Judith Butler, and big woke. “Many progressives were sick at heart about it, though they confessed it only to close friends, preferably after a glass of wine,” she quips about the latter. Identity politics is tribalism, rather than materialism. Like many philosophers, she seems to let the distortions of identity politics on both the right and the left distort the idea of standing up for minorities as not just a social issue, but a civic one. Whose materialism matters? 

This week on the show, Harry and I hung out with the hosts of the State of the League podcast for an hour of classic offseason nonsense. We talked about Paul Schrader getting really into AI, which aging stars should be allowed to do steroids, and Brice Sensabaugh. Oh, you're not familiar with Brice Sensabaugh, the fourth-year shooting guard for the Utah Jazz? Well, you're about to be, as I am confident no other NBA podcast has dedicated this much of its runtime to talking about Brice Sensabaugh. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

The Moon got whacked. The Moon gets whacked a lot, honestly. You can just look at its beaten, cratered surface to see that. But these days we're pretty good at counting its scars. Since 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and constantly imaging its surface, and both computers and humans check those images closely to see if there have been any new kablammos since the last photograph. There often are. The LRO can spot craters as small as 30 feet across, caused by space rocks roughly the size of a monster truck tire. (NASA's comparison, not mine! And honestly a helpful one.) Those happen about 140 times a year. While you wouldn't want to be under one when it impacted, those smaller collisions are basically lunar weather. But every once in a while, something big comes in. Something big enough to get its own name. Say hello to McGetchin, the Moon's newest crater. It's large, and it's fresh—having been born at some point between April 11 and May 22, 2024, the two nearest passes of the LRO. A small bright spot that hadn't been there in the previous photo, according to McGetchin's discoverer, Robert Wagner. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said. The bright patch was typical of previously buried regolith, lunar rock and dust scattered by the impact. Wagner discovered the new crater in images taken by the LRO's wide-angle camera, which captures more of the surface at a time. After that it was time to point the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at McGetchin to make out more detail, and McGetchin looks pretty rad in close-up. The before and after of the same spot on the Moon's surface:

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I should never find myself in a position where I’m forced to cheer on Macklemore. In fact, we’re so far removed from Macklemore’s brief moment of cultural relevance that I shouldn’t even be forced to remember that this guy is even alive. Sometime around 2013, the whole world asked the hip-hop artist to mackle less, and he obliged (likely not of his own free will). That was a happy occasion. Alas, I now must demand that someone besides the artist born as Ben Haggerty mackle less, and that person is Patriots owner and bargain handjob enthusiast Robert Kraft. You’ve perhaps heard about Kraft’s latest venture into senile billionaire fuckery, but I’ll give you the skinny just in case. British folk hobbit Ed Sheeran is doing a stadium tour of the U.S.—this is its own cultural crisis, but that’s for another rant—and booked Macklemore as one of his opening acts. This Normiepalooza tour was due to go off without a hitch (or a memorable hook) until, according to Macklemore, Kraft took umbrage with the rapper’s vocal support of Palestine during his opening set for Sheeran at Giants Stadium earlier this month.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The last few months I've been in the throes of reading and watching information about the murder-for-hire trial of rapper Lil Durk. It's a complete circus that seems to have it all from an entertainment standpoint: snitching gang members, rap lyrics and interviews with streamers used as evidence, Machiavellian defense attorneys, an audience of fanboys and stan armies drawing attention to themselves to the point where people think they might be paid actors and so, so many people treating actual human lives and deaths as fodder for the content machine. One of the worst offenders, a British white man named Trap Lore Ross, is a doofy acolyte of the DJ Akademiks school of cataloguing the violent sensationalism of gang activities and volatile rappers under the guise of “investigative journalism.” He has decided that the Durk trial is his star-making turn, like he’s the Woodward and Bernstein of gang rap. https://youtu.be/FNFL53i0WB0?si=Fg0QyiRCMkVvyfsf

This week, five sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS) and their associated players' unions sent letters to gambling regulators in 35 states requesting that something be done to curtail the increasing amount of harassment athletes are facing from angry gamblers. Their proposal: Give teams and players a way to report harassing behavior directly to regulators, and then have the offending bettors banned from placing future bets. It would certainly be good to prevent antisocial losers who type "kill yourself" into an athlete's Instagram comments from ever loading up a betting app again, but the existence of these letters makes one wonder what else these leagues and their unions could be demanding, and why they are not. The problem with sports gambling is not that it gives antisocial losers an excuse to harass athletes, but that it constantly creates new antisocial losers. The population of American sports bettors is not one in which there are just a few bad apples that need to be dealt with, but rather a self-replenishing orchard of bad apples. Legalized sports gambling is all but designed to produce the kind of behavior these athletes and leagues are decrying, and the sportsbooks will go on doing just that no matter how many bans are issued, so long as every year brings a fresh crop of impressionable 18–24 year olds for them to market their products to.

Well, Pope Leo gave it a hell of a go, we'll give him that. The former Father Bob, or something, kept the Chicago White Sox in first place in the American League Central for 73 consecutive days, or at least supervised their work well enough to keep them there. The team gave fans souvenir pope hats, and then just kept on giving. Given how unholy the White Sox have been in recent years, the presence atop even this blighted division was hard to believe. As the Cleveland Guardians made their annual September push and the lead got narrower, it got only more so. But the White Sox have provided, and on Wednesday even offered them their own prodigal son, the spectacularly traveled Tommy Pham. He has already been released by two different teams this year and was sold to the White Sox by a third, but after Pham literally cornered general manager Chris Getz in an elevator after Tuesday's game and all but shook the GM by the eyelids to get himself activated from the injured list, he delivered a three-run homer off a thigh-high curve ball from Cleveland's best pitcher, Parker Messick, to put the Sox ahead in Wednesday's vital game, 3-2. At that point, Leo must have figured that any help more divinely inspired than that might resemble game-fixing, and stepped away—and soon enough, he found out that this is the American League, where no power is higher than the mean. Within an inning and a half, Cleveland's profoundly whelming Petey Halpin aired out a 3-1 sinker from White Sox lefty Sean Newcomb for his own three-run homer; prior to that, Halpin had been 1-for-35 against lefties this year. Cleveland held on to win, 6-3.