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Tiger Woods has been charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test, following his March 27 rollover crash in Jupiter Island, Florida. In documents and public remarks, police laid out some behaviors of Woods that suggested to them that he was impaired and could not safely operate a vehicle: Woods provided evasive answers to their questions, had difficulties with the field sobriety test, and declined to provide a urine sample, which police suspect would have proven intoxication from prescription medication. In his press conference describing all this, Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek left out one thing which Woods did that many people tend to associate with culpability: In the moments after the crash, Woods used his phone to call Donald Trump. In body camera footage released by the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the Jupiter Island Police Department, and posted to YouTube by WPBF 25 News, an officer at the scene calls to Woods as he drifts away from the scene of the crash. The golfer turns back and can be heard wrapping up a phone call. "Thank you, thank you so much," Woods says to the person on the other end of the line. "All right, you got it. Thank you. Bye." He hangs up the phone and turns his attention to the officer, who has asked him to remain by the scene. "Yeah, I was just talking to the President." Woods says this with a little flip of his phone hand, and the feigned nonchalance of a desperate name-dropper. The officer declines the bait.

Conspiracy theories about athlete ages are not infrequent, though they have declined in popularity recently, and it is rare that they are applied to people from the United States. However, after the release of a concerning video by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a discussion must be had about Konnor Griffin, the prospect being called up to play his first MLB game in the team's home opener Friday against the Baltimore Orioles. Griffin is the most highly touted prospect in baseball, a potential five-tool superstar who will naturally invite comparisons to Mike Trout. If he is a teenager, Griffin would be notable as the first teenage position player to play in an MLB game since Juan Soto—not too shabby a comparison. But is he really? Working off the aforementioned video, the evidence that Konnor Griffin is 19 is as follows: The Pirates and presumably the United States government say so, for one thing. His name is spelled "Konnor," for another. Also he evidently cannot name any women other than his close relations.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) show. The Financial Times reports that the recently de-Sorafied AI giant paid somewhere in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars" for the purchase. The deal immediately prompted a great deal of online handwringing about a nominal media operation selling out to one of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, which is understandable but unwarranted. Nothing will have to change, as even the independent version of TBPN was already so dedicated to cheerleading for the rich and powerful people in tech as to have been indistinguishable from marketing. TBPN streams on Twitter for three hours a day, five days a week. It was launched by startup guys turned streaming guys John Coogan and Jordi Hays in Oct. 2024, and quickly rose to relative prominence: Its audiences have always been small, but audience size doesn't matter as much when the tech world and particularly so many of its most powerful people pay so much attention. TBPN has scored a bunch of rare interviews with the biggest names in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg at last year's Meta Connect. Zuckerberg famously loathes the media and does not do interviews, yet there he was, chopping it up with the boys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQVHHFS73U0

You can count on the things that mark the passage of time on Survivor. Early on, there's the very first tribal council, the first tribal swap, the first double elimination. Nothing looms larger over the early game, though, than the possibility of making the merge. For those uninitiated, at some point about halfway through each season of Survivor, the remaining contestants all join together to form one giant tribe, and challenges broadly turn from team-based to individual; so does immunity, which heightens the tension somewhat. If the early parts of a Survivor season are about figuring out social dynamics and staying alive at all costs, the back half emphasizes the strategic aspects of the game. It's where moves are made and legends are born, and it's my personal favorite stretch. In its sixth episode, Season 50 of Survivor arrived at the merge with a monstrous 17 people. (For reference, most merges are in the 10-13 range.) This made it clear that there would be some shenanigans afoot; tantalizing as the prospect of a jumbo-sized tribal council was, there would have to be. That ended up being true, and we'll get to that, but the point is that this was a merge in the most technical sense, which situates us roughly at the halfway point of season 50. That seems as good a time as any to gather the Defector Survivor sickos—staff writers Luis Paez-Pumar (that's me!), Kelsey McKinney, and Rachelle Hampton, as well as Normal Gossip producer Jae Towle Vieira—to check in on how the season is going, what we've loved and hated about it, and what we think will happen as we enter the very early stages of the season 50 endgame. So, grab your torch and crack open a coconut, we're going in. How are you liking the season so far?

HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but quality isn't the point. The show is a transparent attempt to induct a new generation—and market—into the lucrative fantasy world while massaging the nostalgia of existing fans. The announcement of the show has triggered another repetition of the same cycle that has repeated, ad nauseam, since J. K. Rowling started calling random trans women men to her 13 million Twitter followers. Actors in the series dodge questions about Rowling’s opinions, smiling winningly while they pontificate about how Harry Potter teaches everyone to be nice. Those in the know debate the ethics of watching the show. Meanwhile, a vast, blithe section of the press considers Rowling’s activism—or any anti-trans activism—to be interesting only insofar as they can use it to wring out another ponderous essay on the terrors of so-called cancellation.  On the one hand, you have an imaginative property beloved by millions, and on the other, there are actually existing trans people. As one of the people tied to the train tracks in said artificial trolley problem, I’d like to raise a complaint: It is beneath my dignity to let myself be run over by any trolley, and particularly this trolley, burdened as it is by a cape and a stupid hat. But I digress. Many people are unaware, or only passingly aware, that Rowling has become a full-time agitator against trans people—particularly trans women and trans kids, who she expressly believes do not exist—and that she has used her personal wealth and platform to further a suite of causes to that end, including founding a trans-exclusionary rape crisis center. Rowling helped fund the case that resulted in the 2025 UK Supreme Court judgment defining “sex” in the Equality Act as “biological sex [at birth],” a judgment she publicly celebrated with an unspecified drink and a cigar. I myself have helped document the severe repercussions of that judgment for British trans people. The Verge’s recent piece on Rowling gives a good timeline of her activities in this regard, and makes a clinically precise case for boycotting the new show as a result.  The harm Rowling has done has been less widely publicized than it should be, although it has, at least, been met with passionate opposition by many fans and ex-fans. But there are also barriers to properly recognizing and combating that harm, even among people who have heard about Rowling’s politics and find them execrable. People are often tempted to wander down the conversational dead-end that is “separating the art from the artist.” Harry Potter has historically boasted the kind of approval numbers usually reserved for, say, pizza or “the concept of joy”; fans are, accordingly, defensive about enjoying something so synonymous with childhood nostalgia. Surely watching a show doesn’t make you a bad person, does it? We all love something made under morally compromised circumstances. Can’t someone just pirate the show, or watch it through a friend’s account, and call it a day? 

You know all those photos and videos of folks lined up a million deep at airports last month? It was hard to see those and not feel a sort of ambient discomfort yourself, imagining the stress of being one of those travelers. I know I could only think about how frustrated, anxious, confused, and squished I would feel if I, too, were stuck in that mass of humanity. With that in mind, check out how crunched the chases for the final playoff spots have become in both conferences, with fewer than 10 games remaining in the NHL regular season. These guys are all close enough to smell each other's breath.

Artemis II is headed for the Moon; it quite literally cannot not go to the Moon, now. After a trans-lunar injection burn Thursday evening, there physically is not enough fuel on the spacecraft to do anything but relatively small course corrections. It's on a free-return trajectory, which means that the gravity of the Moon and Earth will do the work of getting it back home over the next eight days. If something went wrong and it started to float off into space forever, they could not stop it. This is very terrifying to me, a coward who is bad at math. But the astronauts are neither of those things, so they're copacetic. Soon after the burn finished, Commander Reid Wiseman snapped the above photo out the window of the Orion crew vehicle. Hey! I know that planet. I live there. It is a particularly beautiful photo of Earth. The brown sands of the Sahara dominate the land we can see; the lights of Spain are visible at mid-lower-left. Clouds swirl above the Atlantic. Aurorae are visible as thin green bands in the lower left and upper right. Zoom in on the photo to see just how thin the atmosphere is, to scale: Our home appears both impossibly fragile and strangely robust.

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School who also appears as "Ben" in 10:04, and may or may not be the nameless narrator of Transcription? For some, literary stardom is an aphrodisiac. Sex and youth are a large part of Lerner's literary persona. His first two novels feature a prodigious amount of boozing and womanizing from Lerner's fictional poet avatar. Adam's promiscuity in the early work recalls a more solemn version of Nathan Zuckerman or the melancholic narrators of W. G. Sebald. Lerner's reputation as a literary male writer who eschews reactionary politics allows him to speak with authority about the "the age of angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization," as he wrote in his previous novel. Transcription, however, takes a different approach than his previous novels, all of which attempt a buzzy metropole-inflected autofiction.  Transcription has more in common with the slender, more feminine-coded novels of Katie Kitamura, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti than his masculinist contemporaries. While the first section of the novel follows a famous male writer setting out to interview his mentor in the shadow of the pandemic, the back half of the book centers on the famous writer's granddaughter, who is refusing to eat. In Transcription, as in The Topeka School, we discover the haunting world of children blurring with the rote world of adults. Like the Rugrats discovering the true meaning of Hanukkah, or Leah being haunted by a Dybbuk on her wedding night, the kids in a Lerner novel are traumatized by their brief forays into adulthood.  The fragile bubble of childhood—and the attempt at transcribing the words of a loved one—are foreshadowed in Lerner’s poem "The Son": "The screen is badly cracked and I get glass in my finger every time I touch it. Something is lost in the transcription because it doesn’t have words, but room tone is gained, a sound bed is made." The book links illness and confession, each section an exegesis of a conversation, recorded and remixed by the author-protagonist. The first section of the book confronts the end of life; the final section contemplates the beginning. Intellectualism stutters in the face of the body. The harsh realistic plotlines of Lerner's previous novels have receded, replaced by the comic tragedy of gentle parenting and brain fog. 

One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued throughout her time with the most lucrative professional sports league in North America. The discrimination included not having proper cold-weather gear for winter games, requests for how she wore her hair, and being told to "shut your fucking mouth." The complaint, filed in a Manhattan court, lists 12 claims under federal and state laws, all a form of either gender discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. It names the NFL as well as two of DeLorenzo's former supervisors as defendants, former NFL officiating chief Walt Anderson and former NFL official Byron Boston, who also supervised her. HRD America first reported reported about the complaint. In a statement to Football Zebras, the NFL said DeLorenzo was fired "following three seasons of documented underperformance," and the allegations in the lawsuit were "baseless." DeLorenzo's lawsuit asserts otherwise. "[DeLorenzo]'s career was not derailed by lack of ability, effort, or dedication," the complaint said. "It was destroyed because she is a woman in an institution that, despite its slogans, is structurally unwilling to treat women as equals."

It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of a waste. This week, with Drew out of town, and the long and contentious libel charges I brought against her and Megan due to their fish-related calumnies in that episode resolved in my favor by a court of law, we remedied that. The result was an episode that touches upon picking up hobbies as an adult, the hazards of the MLB partial season-ticket package, and how to be good at going to restaurants while pointedly not accusing me of any food-safety improprieties. We'll have some more formal MLB preview stuff on the podcast in the weeks to come, but feel free to consider this week's highly informal discussion an overture to all that. We discussed the usefulness of baseball as a place to put your stress and mental illness, offered an adult perspective on eating nine hot dogs in one day, and celebrated the eephus of Phillies utility man Dylan Moore. Whom I confused with Tyler Moore. I'm not apologizing for that, and will never, I'm just getting it on the record. Kelsey talked about "The Bad Grannies" and the other members of her Phillies ticket-package family, we compared our early-season live baseball experiences, and shared our early impressions of baseball's grand ABS experiment. Kelsey also spoke on Baseball Sainthood, a Kelsey Original Concept developed in collaboration with the Elias Sports Bureau; we celebrated a newly canonized Baseball Saint, bemoaned the decline of annoying-style baseball offense, and talked a bit about the Elias Sports Bureau, which was a towering mythic part of my young fandom and is now a place that Kelsey sends weird emails.