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Lindsey Graham's sudden death has elicited plenty of nauseating remembrances from his colleagues in the Senate, none of whom seemed to be all that ashamed to speak and write warmly about a guy whose life's work was bigotry and warmongering. But no tribute has been as bone-chilling as the one offered up last night by Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker. Here's how Parker decided to remember the man she used to cover while working for The New York Times: Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics, I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite… I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the NYT when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened in Charleston. It was summer, but I was wearing pants and a sweater that day because it was always SO freezing in the Capitol. Anyhow, news of the shooting came down, and the DC Bureau chief called me with an order: Get yourself to Charleston ASAP and glue yourself to Graham’s side. She wanted a piece on the senator grappling with the unimaginable. So I headed straight to the airport, arriving in Charleston with just my backpack and what I’d be wearing to work that day, and linked up with Graham. He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours. And he looked at me, with amused distaste, and said: “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” (He was not wrong; I was sweaty and gross). So I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him, resulting in this piece (which, for reasons not worth getting into, ended up being fairly different than the original assignment).

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 dipping pizza crust, worst great athletes, wheelchair envy, and more. Your letters: Charlie:

In the movie Citizen Vigilante, the latest Uwe Boll provocation that's gaining attention from the far-right side of the internet, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, an American vigilante righting the wrongs of Europe's woke-and-broken criminal justice system. Why an American has deemed himself worthy of this task, let's not ask that question ... or too many others. When he's not out patrolling the streets, Sanders makes his living as a landlord. One sequence of scenes shows Sanders in one moment mounting a one-man assault on an entire police force, and in the next he's having a meeting with the staff of his real estate business to get a rundown on his properties. There's something so rich about making the hero/antihero of your vigilante fantasy not just a murderous do-gooder, but a landlord to boot. I could forgive, and maybe get into, Sanders's gratuitous killing, but I cannot abide landlording. Even the creators of Batman knew to make the source of his wealth vague enough to not get in the way of the fantasy. Maybe it is irresponsible of me to describe Citizen Vigilante as a "fantasy." I don't know that that's totally what is going on here. The movie tells the story of an American military expat (maybe? unclear?) living in "Europe" (apparently Croatia?) who, in between his landlord duties, decides to take the law into his hands after watching the city he has immigrated to fall into disarray at the hands of the wrong kinds of migrants. Citizen Vigilante opens with a nice blonde woman taking her adorable white child to the grocery store. Unfortunately, her walk through this dangerously sunny neighborhood takes her past a sketchy building, which you know is sketchy because it has some graffiti on it. As she passes, a knife-wielding black migrant gruesomely stabs her in the neck, then runs away while making ooga booga sounds. We know this particular black stabber is a migrant because the next scene features a news segment which helpfully points out the killer's immigration status, amongst other bits of exposition. The newscaster then posits that, with all this migrant-fueled crime, what might be needed is a mysterious vigilante to come around offering the kind of justice that the legal system cannot. You know, like how they typically talk on the news. This opening is meant to set a scary and upsetting tone, which it maybe would have if it weren't all so shoddily made, devoid of tension or pacing or suspense.

Grab a stool, take a seat, and get ready to learn about cyclospora.

Is there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? Give me all of them: Your künstlerromans, your campus novels, your NYCs, your MFAs. I didn’t go to Iowa, but I’ve read so many recollections of the program that sometimes I think I might have. The pleasures of the genre arise in part from how its entrants play with certain tropes: the struggle to find one’s voice, the anxiety of influence, the labor of constructing an identity, the implicit resolution promised by the book the reader holds in their hands. A key figure in this artistic coming-of-age is the charismatic teacher. The writing teacher is both a vision of a possible future and that future’s arbiter; maybe the first authority to give—or withhold—permission for the student to keep going. The stakes of their pleasure or displeasure are high. This can make it easy to confuse the aim of the class—to write good sentences—with the teacher’s gratification. A good teacher, writes Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex, will get out in front of this confusion, seizing a student’s desire and rerouting it toward its proper object: their education. You could fill a bookshelf with examples where that redirection fails, and the ensuing lessons confer an aesthetic and moral education of an entirely different kind. Julie Buntin’s sophomore novel, Famous Men, is an audacious entry into this canon. The narrator is Wilhelmina (Will) Miles, a budding writer from Greening, a fictional town in Northern Michigan. Greening’s best-known export is the “great American writer” Nathaniel Fellow, who teaches at a prestigious MFA program in New York. When Will discovers his poetry at 14, it dilates her sense of what life and art might look like. In Greening of the early aughts, a world of snow and skinned deer, of “raw-eyed fathers and their identical boys,” she feels constrained—by tensions with her mother; her mother’s predatory boyfriend; a high-school rumor that dogs her after a party; her longing for proximity to art. Her hunger to escape takes Nathaniel as its object—not just his work, but the chance that he might be the father whose identity her mother has never revealed. By the time she finally makes it to his doorstep in her early 20s, his influence and her artistic formation have been intertwined for a substantial portion of her life.

AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France the most competitive sleep environment in sports? "Probably, yeah," answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost's Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every day for nearly a month, and they spend almost every night at a different hotel. There are only two days off, so they must recover from one day's effort before the next day's racing starts the next morning. If you don't sleep, you can't race. One of Greenwell's primary responsibilities at the Tour is making sure the riders are getting enough high-quality sleep every night. On the first rest day of the Tour de France, I caught up with him and Walid Karim, an EF staffer responsible for assembling the team's sleep apparatuses, because I wanted to know how they managed it. Sleep is a whole-day effort, and EF uses some bed technology I'd never heard of before that seems extremely effective. Last year, a staffer told me they averaged over eight hours and 15 minutes of sleep, per rider, per night. The attention given to somnial matters has increased drastically in the recent past. Greenwell joined the team 10 years ago, after stints with Great Britain's Olympic swimming and triathlon programs, and his time in the sport is contemporary with the sleep revolution. "Basically, you just had what you were given," he says of the way things were done when he joined, describing "typical French hotels with these long bolster pillows, that are just so uncomfortable."

To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way. I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely have children ... someday. But I was too transient and my career always took priority, so I just put off the decision. I crossed into my 30s and started to stare down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and knew that even though I still felt like a teenager who is woefully unprepared to be a parent, it was time to make a decision. It still felt like I didn't have enough information. When I was booking guests for the new season of Try Hard, I asked Anna Sale, the creator and host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money, if she had any major transformational moments that she wanted to talk about, and I was thrilled when she suggested the moment she became a parent.

Listening to Jeff Peterson, president of basketball operations for the Charlotte Hornets, talk about the recent LaMelo Ball trade, you get a pretty good idea of what he thinks about last season's team. "There's no doubt in my mind that we had a successful season last year, by a lot of people's standards, and of course LaMelo was a huge part of that," Peterson said, from Las Vegas, upon the formal completion of a deal announced nearly two weeks ago. Eager to sing the praises of the incoming Naz Reid, Peterson was also about as clear as decency could permit about what he seems to think of as the realistic limits of a Ball-led team. "These decisions are challenging, at times, but when you look at the totality of the season, and everything, of where we were, it's important to take an honest look in the mirror. The goal is never to compete for a play-in spot. The goal isn't to get to the play-in, or even to the playoffs for one year." The Hornets recovered from a wobbly start last season to finish with a winning record and make the East's play-in. They went on a tear after the All-Star break, finishing their campaign on a bonkers 30–12 run; Cleaning the Glass says they posted the NBA's seventh-best point differential on the season. Ball, healthy for the first time since his sophomore season in 2022, finished third on the team in minutes played, and the Hornets were about 7.5 points better by net rating when he was on the court, powered by an improvement in offensive efficiency of nearly 13 points per 100 possessions. It was Charlotte's best season by record since 2016; by Basketball Reference's dopey Simple Rating System, which combines point differential and strength of schedule, this was Charlotte's best season literally in franchise history. That accounts for the first part of Peterson's quote up there, the part about the Hornets having had a successful season "by a lot of people's standards" and LaMelo being a big contributor. As for the second part: The Hornets failed to sustain their momentum through the play-in, and their season ended in embarrassment. They needed a last-second go-ahead bucket in overtime to squeeze past a decimated Heat squad, and then three nights later they were summarily be-gibletted in Orlando by a Magic team so desperate to flush their season, fire their head coach, and hit the beach that they might as well have been playing in flip-flops and swim floaties.

There are four players in MLB with a higher bWAR than Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler, but nobody can hope to top him in PAR (pettiness above replacement). Last week, after he was left off of the All-Star Game roster, Wheeler struck out 14 batters to tie his career-best performance. To make it very clear where his motivation came from, after the game he called the All-Star selection policies “BS.” Wheeler turned his doubters into his outers at the pitching mound of success, but he’s not done.  The league listened to Wheeler’s comments, and Wheeler listened to me (as everyone should always). He made enough of a splash with his near-expletives, and his reminders sent to the people who need reminding, that on Friday the league offered him a spot on the All-Star Game roster. They may have thought that this would put the whole ordeal to bed. But that just shows how little the league understands true greatness.  Zack Wheeler knows his worth. He is an artist with the brush of spite in his hand. He cannot be placated with such disrespectful participation trophies. He will accept nothing less than greatness. Would Michelangelo be satisfied with painting only The Creation of Adam and not the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Imagine if Andy Warhol stopped at only one Marilyn. How different might the world be if Shakespeare never expanded past historical plays into the field of tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth? Naturally, Wheeler declined the invitation. He explained to reporters on Saturday, “They disrespected me, so I’m not going to participate.” He added that he didn’t want anyone to throw him a “pity party,” but that’s likely because he’s already been busy for the past week planning himself a petty party. 

Bryce Harper has finally provided an answer to the question of how he ended up helping FanDuel convince a problem gambler to lose more money. You may not be surprised to learn that Harper got himself into this sticky situation partly due to an inability to assign meaning to words. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a FanDuel bettor and gambling addict named Terry Thompson received a personalized video message from Harper that was sent to him by his FanDuel VIP manager, Bryttanni Morgan. The video featured Harper wishing Thompson and his family a happy Thanksgiving, and had the FanDuel logo superimposed on it. Harper released a statement on his Instagram account Monday, saying that he did not record the video in direct partnership with FanDuel, but to fulfill an order made by Morgan through his Cameo account. Harper said that Morgan did not place her order through the business video requests submission form provided by Cameo, and so therefore he could not have known that FanDuel would use it as a branded video message for one of its customers. "I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it," Harper said in his statement.