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Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here. Normal business resumes on Monday. Onward.

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in a stormy emotional moment, by rotating the concept of a guy who hits .217 with 34 homers in their mind—than it does for Reds fans. Recent Reds seasons each contain a high potency of Guys. Scott Schebler hit 30 homers for the Cincinnati Reds in 2017; he was done in the Majors by 2021, when he struck out in half of his 34 plate appearances with the Angels. Scooter Gennett and his Universal Baseball Association-ass name hit 27 homers for that team as well. Adam Duvall hit 31, Zack Cozart 24. They won 68 games. This is just what the Reds have been like: bad, loud, and weird. Duvall had a solid but bizarrely intermittent career; Schebler and Cozart were never good big-leaguers again, although they were both inevitably Angels before it was all over. By 2019, they had been replaced by another wave of Reds Guys. Yasiel Puig, already careening down the shoulder of his MLB career at age 28, hit 22 homers for the team that year. Derek Dietrich hit 19, and finished with a delectable .187/.328/.462 slash line. We used to make things in this country. That team won 75 games. All of the above are Reds Guys. All teams converge toward the mean over time, and moving into the dinger-positive Great American Ball Park in 2003 made the Reds notably more like this by dint of that home stadium's dimensions. But it goes back further than that. Players who dodged the beefy turds of Marge Schott's untrained dogs at a previous Cincinnati ballpark—Glenn Braggs or Kal Daniels or whoever you like—are all part of the long lineage of players who mashed some taters to no great effect for otherwise unremarkable Reds teams. That they were all literally Reds guys does not diminish the extent to which they were, vibrationally speaking, Reds Guys. If Three True Outcomes icon Adam Dunn is something like the prototypical Reds Guy in terms of half-empty and mostly thwarted thump, he is also standing on the shoulders of giants with unsustainable swing-and-miss rates.

Two things are true about me: I hate rich people and I love architecture. These days, that presents a terrible contradiction because only the extremely rich are able to finance the perpetuation of architectural production, whether in the form of new and interesting houses or in the financing of skyscrapers and grand, expensive public-facing private projects like museums or concert halls. Meanwhile, places like schools or libraries are cash poor, public resources like parks or housing are privatized, and much of what remains of the political infrastructure that ushered in the 20th century’s great social programs is as decrepit as some of the buildings, bridges, and roads they’ve left behind.  For about two or three years now, it’s become increasingly difficult to know what to say about architecture, honestly, even though writing about it is my very privileged job. It’s one thing to write “we need an architecture that serves the people, not one that’s a mere bauble for the ruling class” over and over, but as the years roll on, my belief that such a thing is possible is beginning to wear quite thin. This is for a number of reasons, the least of which is the deteriorating political situation in the United States writ large, but perhaps the main one is that the ideological dynamism of the 2010s within architecture (and without) has largely stalled. What has taken its place is either the continued perpetuation of the digital tech-brained “floating cities will solve climate change” way of thinking, whose origins begin in the ’90s and have never stopped (as evidenced by the immediate embrace of AI), or a kind of resignation to the status quo—a pretty building every once and a while, a small library by Jeanne Gang or whatever, and then mostly faceless skyscrapers, luxury apartments, whatever pays the bills or makes an interesting shape that distinguishes itself from all the other interesting-shape buildings. As you can see, I am very depressed.  Recently, I was in Europe hoping to catch those familiar whiffs of a world that is still mostly bad but slightly better than the one we have here. I hold no delusions about some kind of EUtopia; I was simply hoping to encounter buses that run on time, generally pro-social features like public bathrooms, and good bread. Mostly this turned out badly for me. In Berlin, AfD signs littered flagposts (it is election season) and half of the museums were closed for renovations that will take seven years because the city has no money. 

Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel, the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye, and the eternal frown of the sea toad. These spooky fish's great and insurmountable distance from us might offer some reassurance that we are not likely to encounter them in the wild, at least not while either of us is alive. But the world's weirdest-looking fish, at least in my estimation, does not live in the deep sea. The red-lipped batfish trudges in the sludge near the Galápagos Islands, no deeper than 250 feet, which means it is a fish that people are able to encounter in the wild, perhaps even on a special vacation. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to see a red-lipped batfish in the wild without prior knowledge of the species. I have known about the red-lipped batfish for at least a decade now, and each time I see a photo of the fish I still feel the need to blink, to remember that the fish is, indeed, real, to ask myself for the millionth time, What the hell is going on with that fish? Let me show you what I mean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6gp-ACJK6g

Redheads feel your pain. And then some. I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor. See, I must’ve flinched more than the Hopkins doc thought I should when she commenced to burn my flesh, because she stopped the procedure to ask, “Did you used to be a redhead?”

Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtMFDcAprg

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: College football is back! Sort of! Week 0 exists in a strange reality all its own. It is not preseason, as its games are real and important, and yet the vast majority of teams will not be playing during it. Week 0 is therefore an imaginary weekend of real football, but if any sport values the power of imagination, it is this one. Imaginary championships. Imaginary rivalries. Imaginary rules, ethics, and college classes. Even imaginary conferences, like the Pac-12. It's a sport filled with creative silliness. Speaking of imaginary things, the 2026 season hasn't even officially started and it's already filled with drama. Louisiana has ruled that guys who recently left school and got cut from NFL rosters can reenlist in college. The big conferences are already colluding to nip this potentially imaginary new rule in the bud, so it's no surprise that Lane Kiffin has sprinted in to take advantage before it disappears. It wouldn't be this sport if things weren't an absolute mess.

My Grandma Powell was a knitter. She’s still alive, but she’s too old now to knit. Before there were YouTube tutorials, or YouTube, or the internet, she taught herself how to do it. She spent years knitting sweaters, scarves, mittens, and toques (Canadian for "beanie") for herself, her husband, and her four children. By the time my cousins and I came along starting in the ’70s, she was extremely fast. My younger cousin and I got matching sweaters. We also got sweaters with matching leg warmers when that was in vogue. A little later, we got sweaters with matching miniature duplicates to dress our Cabbage Patch Kids in.  No needle held by human hands can produce stitches as fine as you get in a machine-knit sweater, of course. But even when a loose-knit sweater is sold in a store, you can just tell it wasn’t made with love. Those of us who have been the lucky recipients of knitters’ work, or have learned the skill themselves—I personally never progressed far enough even to turn a square Grandma started for me into a scarf—can spot good knitwear at a glance, even on a screen.  And while the sweaters in rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally are rightly famous, sweeping epics about love and dialectical materialism can be chock-full of them, too. Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 debut as a solo director (he had previously co-directed 1978’s Heaven Can Wait with Buck Henry), stars Beatty as John “Jack” Reed, a journalist, poet, and socialist-turned-Communist activist; Beatty also co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor Griffiths. The film chronicles his life from first meeting his eventual wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) in Portland, Ore.; their romance in Greenwich Village, Provincetown, Croton-on-Hudson, and Petrograd; and his death in Moscow, after which he became one of just three Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Am I qualified to comment on its historical accuracy, politics, or whether Maureen Stapleton deserved the Best Supporting Actress Oscar she won for playing Emma Goldman? No, on all counts. I’m here to rank its handmade sweaters.

Is there life on Mars? That's the wrong question. Every time scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, or any other terrestrial organization bring news back from Mars of fresh discoveries in the hunt to find evidence of life on the fourth planet, I find myself mildly annoyed that the general populace's focus is trained exclusively on the quest to find the tiniest microresidue of exobiota. That's a narrow angle, one that crops out everything in the background that makes the quest possible or worthwhile. Mars is fascinating because of its broader planet-scale dynamics. It is both Earthlike (the two planets rotate at roughly the same speed, their inner layers and elemental compositions are roughly equivalent, and they both have moons), and alien (Mars is relatively small and light, has no atmosphere, and orbits the sun very slowly) in some important ways. Also, the larger-order mysteries about the state of life on Mars are mostly settled. Whatever lived there has been dead and gone for billions of years, unless one generously expands the parameters of "lived." The better question is something like: Why would there have been life on Mars? Is this question even more enticing? We have to be honest: No, of course not. Nothing down that road is as cool as life. But there is still cool stuff. I am talking of course about Mars's glacial spiders.

When I learned that Defector would be running Reds Week for its random annual late-summer theme week, I had one thought: Man, I really wish I had another week of time off to spend. Every year, Tom Ley announces the theme of theme week, and people start kicking around story ideas, and I think to myself, OK, next year, no matter what, I have to remember to leave myself one full week of time off, so that I can skip theme week. And then I blow it. Blowing it is part of the tradition. Anyway, here I am. Let's make some romesco. By the grace of God, romesco fits not only thematically but seasonally. It is a paste made of roasted tomatoes, nuts, and bread. Here where I am—and by that I mean literally inside of my property line, and possibly nowhere else—now is the very climax of Tomato Time. You see, due to leaving town during optimal planting season back in the spring—this is where I blew it with my time off—I was late getting maters into the ground. And because I was already late, I went ahead and made myself super turbo late by procrastinating further. I did not plant tomatoes in my little stupid garden until mid-June, and at that point only because it was either grow tomatoes or grow invasive weeds, and the weeds were depressing me. So I planted nine tomato plants, a nearly random selection of the last seedlings still to be found at a nearby farm stand. It turns out two of those plants back there are Romas, which are terrific for sauces and for canning but are rather prolific determinate tomatoes, which means that you get a ton of them all at once, and you have to figure out what to do with them in a hurry, which is why they so often wind up in jars and cans and huge vats of Sunday gravy. The point is that romesco is a great thing to do with a haul of red tomatoes. You could also make it with yellow tomatoes, I suppose, but then you would be empty-handed for Reds Week, and evidently that matters to some people! Your reason for making romesco, of really any color, is not only so that you can justify a blog and thus a paycheck. It is extremely delicious. In my humble opinion there are three things you should ever go out of your way to serve with a really good slab of whitefish, and they are beurre blanc, salsa verde (the Italian one), and romesco. The theory is basically the same for the latter two: You smash things together until you have a luscious and richly colored sauce, and then you dunk your face in there and maybe even paint your upper body in the finished concoction. Where a good salsa verde tastes like anchovies, capers, and parsley, a good romesco tastes strongly of tomatoes and garlic, with the richness and crunch of nuts and the dark underlying molasses-y notes of good dried chiles. There are variations, of course—some are mildly spicy, some are less garlicky, some incorporate red bell peppers, some have clearly been bogged down with ancient paprika—but when romesco is made with really any fidelity at all, it tastes super duper red, and I think you know what I mean by that. Let's make some.