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Some people are fans of the Chicago Bears. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Chicago Bears. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: The Chicago Bears, who are not yet the Hammond, Indiana, Bears. Your 2025 record: 11-6, a staggering outlier for a franchise far more comfortable with 6-11. A new coach, a repaired and better protected quarterback, and the next big running game. We were comfortable with the Bears being persistently mediocre, and now we have to deal with the possibility that they could own the NFC North for more than one year, which they haven't done since 2006, when Rex Grossman roamed the Earth.

Following Tuesday's news of Dolly Parton's death, the Defector staff convened to remember some of our favorite performances by her. "High Sierra" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvKRwNR7kXw

It’s a rite of passage to get your ideals smashed in your early twenties, just in the normal course of trying to get your feet under you. It doesn’t seem to matter what exactly you care about, either. Whether you’re voting and then watching election results, or you’re trying to make a college relationship last beyond graduation, or you believe that with enough energy and grit, you and your ideals can save the trees, you’re in for a few bruises.  But every bright-eyed youth loses innocence in their own way. Today’s friend of a friend is out to solve the affordable housing crisis, but she’s about to learn that all of us, however committed to “the work” we may seem, have a greater aptitude for mess than for the revolution.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1-Htdmg9U

In observance of Reds Week at Defector, Lauren and Alex decided to try a red lip, as modeled in this brief tutorial. Here, in the style of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, are their results. Lauren: Hi Alex! So as we start with moisturizer, I wanted to ask right up top: What’s your history with red lip, and, I suppose, lip products in general? Alex: The first thing that feels important to note is that my lips have always been a source of insecurity for me, because they are very small! The closest I’ve ever come to considering injectables was when lip flips came out and the possibility of full, lovely lips was dangled in front of me. I haven’t done it—I think any change would simply be too drastic for me to get away with, because I’m starting with so little! But in my kinder moments, I also think to myself: I have my mom’s mouth, and I like her mouth, so I can live with this one.

The competition for the much-coveted Who Won The Offseason Prize is nearly over. Despite a late rally from the Cleveland Browns, who became the first team to eliminate themselves from the regular season by quintupling down on the disaster that has been, is, and seems hell-bent on continuing to be Deshaun Watson, it seems clear that the winner will be the San Francisco 49ers. Besides, it's Reds Week, not Oranges Week, which means that even with that photo of Jed York in his jail smock, red is still the color of the day. And York is part of that, too, with his arrest on Monday capping what has perhaps been the single weirdest offseason in recent NFL memory. Not only did the owner of the Red and Gold (see, we told you) get arrested near a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio and midwife the phrase "criminal tools" into the popular lexicon, but he managed to steal center stage from his head coach Kyle Shanahan, whose auto accident in Palo Alto six weeks ago still confuses folks even after he offered not one but two explanations for it. And between them, they both trumped the ongoing urban legend of the Power Plant That Eats Football Players, a theory that was developed to explain the Niners' implausibly bad injury luck; it has been debunked by those pesky scientific types but will certainly rise again the next time a 49er gets hurt. The concept of an electrical facility that emits ligament-devouring Z-rays is too delightful to reject merely because it isn't true. It is difficult to pinpoint just when the offseason became more important than the actual season in sports, though many people figure it was LeBron James' Year of The Decision, 2010. That was the summer when he left Cleveland, which is a small Ohio town 90 miles west-northwest of East Palestine, to pursue his bliss in Miami, before he found it again in Cleveland, which was before he found it in Los Angeles and directly before he found it in Philadelphia. Since then, each sport has sought to keep customers plugged in even without the benefit of games, hopping from the draft to the combine to free agency in the attempt to keep the suckers penned and feeding.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we spent the entire episode talking through the last 13 years of Los Angeles Lakers ownership drama. Our guest Harrison Faigen is a longtime Lakers media guy, and he joined us for a lengthy discussion on Mark Walter, Joshua Kushner, and Johnny, Jimmy, Jeanie, Janie, Joey, and Jesse Buss. It's crazy they're all named that. The tie-in to Reds Week is that my name is Patrick Redford. 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 most awe-inspiring thing in music is when an artist takes over the world. At least back when there was a monoculture, it was possible for a single person to dominate collective attention, at least for awhile. And 1998 should always be remembered as the year DMX did just that. Throughout the '90s, Earl Simmons, a.k.a. DMX, had been making waves that steadily grew into real, earth-shaking tremors over the back half of the decade. Prominent guest spots on songs like Mic Geronimo's 1995 track "Time to Build," where X traded verses with fellow burgeoning acts Jay-Z and Ja Rule, the LL Cool J–led posse cut "4, 3, 2, 1" in 1997, and the Lox's single "Money, Power, Respect" in early 1998 indicated that he was on the cusp of a full breakout. While 1998 marked a definitive before and after, his ascent that year was the culmination of a long, hard struggle to break into the industry. https://youtu.be/zAZqlaDCLSI?si=iGT2MxqLWsYktPSZ

There are certain types of baseball players that just are not coming back. Some of these guys have been written out of the story by changes in the game's rules; future generations will be unable to comprehend the wealth of saturnine lefty specialists whom the world once watched trudge-jogging from the league's bullpens, not just because the mind naturally reels at such beauty, but because the role no longer exists as such. An evolving set of best practices has also narrowed the field of Guys, or just refined it in a way that puts the squeeze on elite specialists and the lumpen class of ham-and-egger generalists alike. In baseball's optimized future, pinch-runners and innings eaters will both be endangered species. If you're old enough to remember a version of the game that was not like this—all those kludgy and misshapen rosters built from those kinds of irregulars—it is natural to mourn its passing. Contemporary baseball is not worse than that bygone version played by guys who looked like bartenders and bar-goers, but anyone old enough to remember all that would also be old enough to default to mourning where the past is concerned. The sport's margins have always been narrow, and basically every career teeters on a knife's edge; this is a workplace, after all. But as business-brained optimization has spread throughout the sport, the fact of all that has escaped the anxious liminality of subtext to create a new and dispiritingly contingent type of job. If baseball has created a new type of Guy during its ongoing efficiency revolution, it is the ultra-fungible bottom-of-the-roster type who changes teams three or four times per season during and after stints in DFA limbo; some of the people doing that work have been All-Stars, but most of them are pluggers whose names few fans will learn or remember. They are big-leaguers, too, but as Dreams Come True go, this one doesn't seem like much fun. There aren't many pitchers like Tom Browning in the majors in 2026. His greatest ability during 12 big-league seasons, 11 of which he spent with the Cincinnati Reds, was availability, followed closely by durability. If you want to expand the list further, you'd still hit affability before bringing up his screwball he picked up in A-ball. He pitched a lot of innings and gave up a decent amount of hits; he didn't strike many batters out and walked even fewer than that. He won 20 games in a season and the third game of the Reds' World Series sweep in 1990; he threw a perfect game at home in 1988 after waiting out a rain delay of more than two-and-a-half hours. Over the course of his career, Browning led the league in starts four times, home runs allowed three times, and earned runs allowed once.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Albert answers a question about a kid who might be a little bit of a mess.

A couple of blocks from my office is a steep hill. Sometimes at lunch I go out into the sun and walk up the hill. The hill is very California: asphalt so newly laid that it looks AI-generated; a handful of wheeling turkey vultures; golden dried grass edging up to fortress-like new construction. I usually march up the sidewalk, but there’s also a path that winds through blackberry vines and over the creek, past where people without other places to stay have been sleeping. It’s a Diebenkorn painting; it’s the place he runs to at the opening of The Beginning Place. Walking up the hill restores me to myself when I am tired or cranky or worried about something I have done or failed to do at work. The only problem is that I have to face down death. At the end of the first block is a stoplight. If you turn right at that stoplight, you find yourself in a shopping center with a Lucky and a Home Depot. This shopping center is used a lot while the sidewalk that goes up the hill is used significantly less. Drivers are always turning right to go to the shopping center, or turning right as they come out of the shopping center, and often they make those turns without regard to whether or not there is a pedestrian about to step into the roadway.  This is galling, especially because it’s one of those California intersections where in order to cross legally I, the pedestrian in question, have to hit a button before the light turns green in the direction I want to go, or else I am stuck there first watching the traffic stream in my direction, then the traffic making the protected left, then the traffic going in the opposite direction, then the traffic making the protected left in the other direction. This probably takes a minute and a half—it feels like a lifetime.