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What do you do when the gig you do on the side, that off-hours hustle to help pay the bills and keep busy in service of your real work, becomes the thing that attracts acclaim and recognition? Do you lean into the success? Does the side project become your life? Hrishikesh Hirway did not expect he would become a podcast guy, but the show he created and hosts, Song Exploder, took off, winning awards and making the leap to becoming a Netflix series. Then came other podcasts—maybe you know him from The West Wing Weekly, or as Samin Nosrat's buddy from the show Home Cooking. Yet all along the way, Hirway still felt the gravitational pull back to his original love of music as a singer/songwriter. This past spring, he released In The Last Hour Of Light, his first full-length album in 15 years. "The most central part of me is this music. It's my primary identity, and it's the thing that I am most passionate about and have been doing before I ever started making podcasts," Hirway said. "It's taken me a long time to get back here."

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 sentence diagrams, proper oven temperature, forbidden urinals, and more. Before we get to the business at hand, a quick reminder that All Ball, the Defector NFL podcast, debuts tomorrow morning. Co-host Arif Hasan and I are bringing you 100 percent football takes, with no added gambling or fantasy talk. Look for it in the organic podcast aisle! Your letters:

FLUSHING, N.Y. — The U.S. Open is a city in miniature. The food is expensive; wealthy people flock to the tallest vantage points while richer experiences on the outskirts are ignored; influencers bother the masses. Read enough about the tournament, or just walk around the grounds for a few days, and you could forget that tennis is played here. At its worst, the Open feels like a 15-day cocktail party where a couple hundred of the world's best tennis players happen to be present. Those players aren't going anywhere, though, no matter how high the ticket prices get or how muted the ambiance becomes. And they tend to play some great tennis while they're here. Carlos Alcaraz is back from a four-month layoff for a wrist injury, and so is his forehand. He hit a winner at 107 mph to get his first break of the tournament. The serve's still missing, but that's fine; he's playing at an all-world level even without it, and the forehand was always more synonymous with his abilities as an entertainer. Alcaraz spent his first two matches reviving the gonzo, inventive style that went extinct during his absence. Rather than crush short backhands down the line, he wafted them crosscourt, trying to hit the advertising boards along the sides of the court before his opponent could reach the ball. He tickled the forecourt with drop shots and let the area around the baseline feel the vertical plonk of a lob as well as the horizontal swipes of his forehand. To some, though, Alcaraz's off-court movements are of more interest. During his first-round match, I inadvertently glanced at my media section neighbor's phone and caught an incoming text, printed here with neighbor's permission: "Is Carlos a pussy hound?"

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe. This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Sept. 3. There is a legacy of bare competence behind the Angels’ 65-year run of never losing 100 games that shouldn’t be taken for granted. If this year’s iteration finally uncorks that bottle of swill, it will be a fitting monument to outgoing owner Arte Moreno who, finally, mercifully, agreed to bow out this week. What Stan Kroenke’s ownership will be like beyond the inevitable shiny new sports palace and adjoining pre-fab “neighborhood” remains to be seen, but the bar is as low as it was after Bob Quinn’s stewardship of the Red Sox or Frank McCourt’s misuse of the Dodgers.

Pretty much from the moment the Florida State Seminoles decided to retain Mike Norvell as their coach for the 2026 season, the word out of the football program has been pain and misery. They lost three dozen players to either graduation or the transfer portal, they couldn't entice any of the better available quarterbacks, and they have been famously poor at recruiting throughout the Norvell era. Going into the season, the mood was dour, and an unimpressive victory over New Mexico State in Week 0 didn't improve the mood very much. When the big Labor Day weekend of games came to its conclusion with an FSU home matchup against SMU, and America was treated to a darkened stadium and an extended delay, it was hard for me personally to not sit there cackling like Max Cady at the status of my once-proud football school. https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/2097114243921232359?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097114243921232359%7Ctwgr%5E94ac4d061e8bfb73b0f3356d64113f29f0532308%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fawfulannouncing.com%2Fnews%2Fespn-power-outage-delay-florida-state-smu.html That's right! SMU–FSU kicked off nearly two hours late thanks to an unexplained power outage at Doak Campbell Stadium. As a Tallahassee native, my first thought was: Of course, there must be a hurricane or thunderstorm involved. But no, the weather was perfect (except for the humidity, and that's normal). The lights would flicker on and off for a while. It seems to have been some kind of power drain at the stadium (not a metaphor) that caused problems. After the lights did come on, the game had already lost any juice it might've had, starting with our problematic mascot throwing the flaming spear onto midfield and having it fall with a lifeless thud rather than stick the landing (also not a metaphor).

Four matches into the La Liga season, Barcelona has looked like one of the greatest attacking teams of all time. What other conclusion can I draw from the club's start? With Sunday's 5-0 whomping of Valencia away at the Mestalla, Barcelona has now played four matches, notched four decisive wins (5-0 vs. Elche, 2-0 vs. Athletic Bilbao, and 5-2 vs. Rayo Vallecano were the others), scored a ludicrous 17 goals, and conceded only two. The Barcelona monster has been gluttonous from the word go, and the way that the blaugrana has been performing is more than sustainable, even if the actual tallies are out-of-this-world unbelievable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVeuyol-th4 About that Valencia match: The Bats are a disaster of a club, mired in last place domestically with just one point, and its fans are currently feuding openly with ownership. It's hard enough to keep up with Barcelona, never mind to actually beat the Catalan giant, and so there was little question about the result on Sunday. Lamine Yamal opened the scoring in the sixth minute with a feathered chip past Valencia goalie Stole Dimitrievski, and it went downhill for Valencia from there.

Did you forget about the Yankees? I know you did not because you are not allowed to. But New York has had a relatively quiet season by their flamboyant and national-TV-darling standards. A big part of this is that the AL East has looked pretty much the same for a while now: The Rays have maintained a comfortable but not secure division lead; the less said about what's happening down there with the bird teams, the better; and in the middle, the Red Sox have ended child hunger and positioned themselves for what feels like an inevitable three-game wild card series against New York. If the Yankees have been invisible, it's because they've only been "pretty good," and mostly because they can't hit for shit. Since June 1, they've slashed .227/.295/.385, rank 26th in MLB in runs scored, and 29th in wRC+. That they remain safely in playoff position is testament to their league-best pitching, but any self-respecting Bronx Bomber fan will tell you that's an unethical way to win ballgames. That's what the "Milwaukee Brewers" do. Yankees fans demand big boys! Big meaty boys swinging those big bats! Instead they got Trent Grisham. That changes tonight. Why choose June 1 as the cutoff for the stats above? That's the day Aaron Judge went on the IL for a stress fracture in his rib, suffered more than a month earlier. “We’ve had long stretches where the offense has struggled. I think a big part of that is not having your guy,” manager Aaron Boone said. Their guy has now missed more than half the season, and as goes Judge so go the Yankees: They were a .610 team with him in the lineup, and a .536 team without him.

Before the NFL season kicks off this weekend, it will kick off Wednesday night with a primetime game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. And then on Thursday night it will kick off again, with a game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, except that game will actually be happening on Friday morning, on account of it being played in Melbourne, Australia. Probably nobody should ask the Rams what day it is when they arrive for the game, because they won't have much time to get acclimated. They aren't leaving Los Angeles until tonight. Rams head coach Sean McVay made the team's travel plans known over the weekend, telling reporters that the team will be boarding a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne on Tuesday night, and arriving in Australia roughly 24 hours before their game against the 49ers kicks off. The flight from L.A. to Melbourne is roughly 16 hours, which when combined with the 17-hour time difference between the two cities, means that it will be Thursday morning in Australia when the Rams finally land. The game starts at 10:35 a.m. local time on Friday, which leaves the players about a day to acclimate and rest before kickoff. The 49ers left home almost a week ago, and have been practicing in Melbourne this whole time. The Rams are insistent that their plan is better, though, in part because of how they successfully navigated a game in London last season. After beating the Ravens in Week 6, the Rams stayed on the East Coast for a few days before flying to London the day before their Week 7 game against the Jaguars, which they won 35-7. Of course the potential destabilizing effects of a flight from the East Coast to London is nowhere near those presented by one from L.A. to Melbourne, but McVay told reporters that every player on the flight will have a lie-flat bed.

“I’m coming to the cottage,” Ilya Rozanov growled, and Canada has never been the same—at least the American film and TV industry’s depiction of it. The final episode of the first season of Heated Rivalry introduced the world to Canada’s cottage country, presenting the regions to the north of major cities where many families own second homes as a soft escape from the friction of urban life. In Heated Rivalry, as well as a slew of other recent shows, Canada’s rural expanses are not only lush, they’re sexy. There’s something about lakes, trees, and short shorts that loosens inhibitions, lest the summer be wasted. “A Canadian summer is fleeting and precious,” Every Summer After author Carley Fortune said after her romance book was adapted into a British Columbia-based show in June. “That feels Canadian to me—it’s the lake, the dock, the boat, the mosquitoes.” As an American who’s lived in Canada for five years, I think the liberal American perception that Canada offers the American Dream without the fascism has contributed a great deal to the country’s recent turn in the spotlight. The reality up here is less idyllic: Canada’s social programs are getting weaker, their discriminatory immigration system is simply less attention-seeking than the States’, and their right-wing figures are often just as repugnant. But Canada is nevertheless preferable to Trump’s America in many ways, and besides, romanticization has never relied on realism. Romance media set in rural Canada doesn’t look to be stopping anytime soon.

You'll have a grand time solving our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Katie Hoody, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Katie lives in North Newton, Kansas, where she is enjoying the puzzle constructing era of her life. She grew up in northern Minnesota and won a middle school speech contest with a monologue describing the thrill of watching the Twins win the 1987 World Series. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."