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Some pathetic, frontrunning dorks are fans of the Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Rams. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Los Angeles Rams. Your 2025 record: 12-5. Heh. Haha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

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 iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more. Your letters: Monte:

The Chicago Cubs have maintained an awfully low profile for a team that 1) wins often, and by a lot of runs, 2) homers more than anyone, and 3) has an increasingly sure-thing MVP patrolling center now that Shohei Ohtani is slumping through his ouchy season. The Cubs hit nine homers on Monday night in a full 17-3 clocking of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball, and it landed as quietly as something that inherently loud could land. That feat has been eclipsed only once in baseball history, but it was also eclipsed more or less instantaneously by one homer that very dramatically wasn't.  That the Cubs are the secret in plain sight may be for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that none of those nine dingers was hit by Pete Crow-Armstrong, the MVP we mentioned a paragraph ago and the latest anagrammatic athlete in the American playground; no, he stayed stuck at 38, trailing only Kyle Schwarber in all of baseball. Crow-Armstrong—we're all adults here, and we can type and read full names, even hyphenated ones—leads everyone in WAR, Offensive WAR, Adjusted OPS+, and lots of other fun metrics you won't have to look up. He is the second best hitter in baseball besides Yordan Alvarez, as well as an excellent defensive player, and he has played in every game this year, an increasingly appreciated skill in the load management era. He vibrates his way through all the games he never misses, and in short is not just the consensus MVP but the MFP: Most Fun Player. But while Crow-Armstrong is the Cubs' best player by a decent margin, he's not alone in terms of power production. The Cubs in general are mad bombers of the first order; in their last eight games, they have won 19-2, 17-5, and 17-3, and have hit double digits in more than a quarter (20 of 78) of their wins and topped eight in 40, of which they managed to lose two, including one over the weekend. The wonder is how they remain seven games behind the Brewers, which may be partially answered by the fact that they are also tied for last in home runs allowed—a truly preposterous 209—which at the current pace would make them the 15th-most generous pitching staff in the sports history when it comes to giving up homers. Now how do you not market the hell out of that?

It did not take a lot of special insight to suspect that recently installed CBS News boss Bari Weiss played some role in the production of a story the outlet ran on Monday, headlined "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks." If you know even a little bit about Weiss, you know that such a story combines two of her favorite things: talking about people's old tweets and blatant Islamophobia. That suspicion was confirmed Monday night by Status News, which reported that Weiss was so impressed by the story she specifically praised it during the network's daily editorial meeting on Monday. She also personally directed a change in the headline to include explicit reference to El-Sayed, deleted posts, and 9/11, according to sources who spoke with Status. This has apparently caused some outrage among CBS staffers who noted, along with many others who read the story, that the whole thing is stupid and shamelessly racist. The posts in question are completely anodyne, which is obvious even in the way the story describes them:

It's been an eventful year for Ringer founder and podcast host Bill Simmons. He ended 2025 and began 2026 at a peak in popularity, thanks to his performance on a podcast titled "Bill’s 50 Most Rewatchable Movies of the 21st Century," which earned him the kind of crossover appeal he's rarely enjoyed. Just before that, he signed a deal to have to have several Ringer podcasts licensed to Netflix. Then he got to tell the world about how the Jaylen Brown trade happened during his colonoscopy. For the last eight months or so, Simmons has been, to borrow a phrase, on Apex Mountain. But mountains are slippery, and Simmons has been steadily sliding back to sea level over the last few months. Consider the following pieces of information: During episodes of The Rewatchables, Simmons established a new segment in which he uses ChatGPT to produce, in Roger Ebert's voice, a review of a movie that Ebert never got to write about, on account of him being dead. ChatGPT recently became a presenting sponsor of The Bill Simmons Podcast, and during his first attempt at reading the ad copy he pronounced it "ChatGBT." On the Aug. 9 episode of his podcast, he once again brought up the fact that he does not wear a seatbelt when he drives. On the Aug. 25 episode of a Ringer podcast about historic box-office flops, he wore an Anduril hat. Where one even acquires an Anduril hat is not a question that can be answered by a person in my tax bracket. On the most recent episode of his podcast, he gave a detailed description of his participation in proxy betting. Because he lives in California, where sports gambling has not been legalized, he calls his daughter's boyfriend, who lives in a state where sports gambling is legal, gives him his FanDuel login information, and has the boyfriend place bets on his behalf. FanDuel, with whom The Ringer signed a lucrative sponsorship deal, explicitly prohibits proxy betting.

As Lauren Theisen pointed out last month, the ongoing, abstracted debate about trans inclusion in sports uses almost no proper nouns and lots of hypotheticals. Back in the late 1970s, there was a very real, very human example of a trans athlete playing at the highest level of a mainstream sport. Renée Richards competed in professional tennis, and her fascinating life is explored meticulously in Julie Kliegman's new biography, Finding Renée Richards. The book is an invaluable intervention in the tortured public discourse, which in recent weeks has been polluting the WNBA. Read this book and forget that Enes Kanter Freedom or Royce White exist. I led a Q&A with Julie for the book's launch last week, and have condensed and edited parts of our conversation below.

PHILADELPHIA — The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was designed in 1917 by French architect Jacques Gréber in the European style of boulevard, specifically inspired by the Champs-Élysées, which means it is a thematically apt and suitably picturesque locale for the end of a cycling race and a horrible—I mean absolutely dogshit, for all involved parties—road. On Aug. 30, the first Philadelphia Cycling Classic in a decade, by simple virtue of being a cycling race that necessitated mass closure of roads to their invasive predators (cars), rendered the Parkway back down to its theoretical beauty: a shaded, expansive corridor connecting City Hall to the Philadelphia Art Museum, one which happens to be flanked by flags. Pedestrian traffic was dictated by volunteers in bright orange shirts. Sometimes the impending cyclists were well-telegraphed by the blaring horns of incoming organizer cars, but other stragglers were conveyed by word of mouth. "Batter up!" one volunteer yelled, before the whistling and cowbells commenced for a lone cyclist. When the volunteer waved a crowd of pedestrians by to the shaded side of the road, she directed us to pause halfway and look to the left for potential cyclists. I stood somewhere between India's and Iceland's flags to watch the final stretch of the women's race, mostly on a gigantic screen set in the middle of the road. The crowd was a mix of locals, legitimate enthusiasts of the sport of cycling, more general enthusiasts of cycling in general, and foreign tourists. To my left were three older men who had done some amateur bike races before. To my right, past India, was a crowd of spectators sitting on bleachers.

They don't give style points in baseball, but if you were scoring Orioles-Rockies, you'd want to break out a second, third, maybe even a fourth color of pen to decorate the box with Colton Cowser's ninth-inning catch to save the game for Baltimore. Maybe some tempera as well. You can't make that "F8" pretty enough. All home-run robberies are special, but they come in flavors. On most, the fielder is totally vertical—having had time to settle on the track for a towering fly ball, and lofting himself at the right moment to haul it in. On Cowser's grand larceny of Jake McCarthy, he had no time to plan it, no time to set. He was at a full sprint back, and hurled himself into the wall, and as he reeled in what would have been a game-winning home run, his legs were scissored outward, his momentum back instead of up. Barely controlled ballet. O's manager Craig Albernaz called it "the best play I’ve ever seen." Dare you dissent? https://youtu.be/_LuMGPrkbZ0?t=707

If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, I have some bad news to share: "The End of Reading Is Here." It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece that represent real challenges to readers today: attacks on our capacity for attention, metrics that show marked declines in reading comprehension, the impacts of generative AI on readers and reading, and more. But The Atlantic's framing places it firmly in a tradition with which the still-existing reading public is all too familiar: the piece proclaiming the demise of books and reading, and the devastating effects of that demise for the world we live in. The writer Trevor Aleo identified this trend in his response to Horowitch, calling her entry “the Platonic form of pearl-clutching clickbait about the decline of reading.” A smattering of her predecessors, all from the last couple of years, include Tyler Cowen proclaiming “Goodbye to the Age of the Book” at The Free Press; James Marriott declaring “The dawn of the post-literate society” in a viral piece on his Substack (Marriott is also about to release a book on the topic: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society); and Beth McMurtrie with “Is This the End of Reading?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Horowitch herself has been productive in the past writing in similar veins, with pieces like “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Many of these pieces engage with real issues, but tend to use those issues to advance a doom narrative that both flatters the reader for being one of the few people left who can follow an argument at length, and presents the situation as essentially beyond hope. There’s much that can and should be said about this onslaught of post-literate panic, but it’s also worth noting who is and isn’t being asked to contribute to the conversation. Notably absent from these essays is one group of people who might have real insight into the situation: booksellers. The prognosticators wring their hands over the demise of reading, but ignore those whose very livelihood depends on the selling of books. Perhaps they might have something to say on the subject. 

Three NFL players were placed on the commissioner's exempt list this past weekend: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Terrion Arnold, Denver Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper, and Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs. All three will be unable to play while they are on the list, but they still get their game checks. It's the NFL's version of paid leave. All three have been charged in criminal court. For Cooper and Jacobs, the charges are in cases that include allegations of intimate-partner violence. Arnold is charged with playing a role in a violent robbery and kidnapping in Florida. The commissioner's exempt list was a little-used tool until 2014, when video came out showing then–Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice hitting his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and fans were outraged that Rice had been suspended just two games for what happened. Since then, the list has become a tool used by the NFL to get players off the field before a full investigation can be done. It also usually involves a player getting a lot of negative media attention and typically, though not always, involves intimate-partner violence. As Mike Florio put it over at ProFootballTalk: "The league regards the move as not punishment (even though it absolutely is)."