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Sponge got their guitars stolen on Tuesday. I know this because the band’s publicist, Leo Lavoro, is going above and beyond his job description by trying to get them back. My email address must still be on a distribution list somewhere, thanks to my previous life as a music critic, because I received the following…

Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the baffled, to the outright disturbed. “In a capsule review, the Los Angeles Times nervously conceded that ‘there is a talent here,’ albeit, ‘an eldritch one,’” noted Ben Ehrenreich in an essay about Evenson’s work that appeared in The Believer. One reviewer, though, an anonymous one, was unequivocal in their dismay over the book’s violent content, which included dismemberment, mutilation, insects placed in the mouths of corpses, and defenestration, among other indignities. “I feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it,” wrote the nameless critic.  This particular review would prove enormously consequential for Evenson’s career—indeed, for his life. It did not appear in a journal or a newspaper. It was not even published, technically. Rather, it was sent to Evenson’s employer, a university, triggering an inquiry that would lead to his dismissal.  The nameless critic was a student at Brigham Young University, the flagship institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, located in Provo, Utah, where Evenson taught for the good reason that he was a devout Mormon, raised in the faith his whole life. The student wrote to the university out of concern that a violent, disturbing book like Altmann’s Tongue was not the sort of literary work that good Mormon professors should be pursuing. Over the course of the long and involved inquiry process, Evenson was presented with a choice. If he wished to continue working at BYU, he would have to stop writing books like that. If he didn’t stop, he would have to leave. 

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I have another soccer game to attend. This has been a parental duty for me and my wife ever since our son got into the sport sometime around the age of zero. You have kids, and you soon realize that the bulk of your time will be spent driving them places. As such, my wife and I have spent the past 17 years driving our son to soccer practice, soccer meetings, soccer games, and soccer team pizza parties. We’ve done this without malice, but the practice can’t help but turn a bit rote when you’ve been doing it for as long as we have. That’s been especially true during the boy’s senior year of high school. This year, he finally made the varsity team. No small accomplishment, but one that requires a great deal of his time and, by association, ours. Practices every day. Two games a week, some of them on the road, all of them extending relatively late into the evening. At one point, his team played a streak of half a dozen games that went to extra time; many of these were played in the rain, which I found extra rude. Some nights, he’s had to do his homework after coming back late from these games. Thus, the schedule is so demanding that the games, for any parent, can begin to feel like a bit of obligation.

Defector will publish no written league-wide preview for the 2026-27 NBA season. Not even a cute, belatedly published one, either. Instead we enlisted Harry Krinsky, co-host of our podcast Nothing But Respect and avant-garde vertical video artist, to preview each team. He then produced mankind's first completely decentralized NBA season preview, which has been recentralized for your viewing pleasure below. Here's Harry: They said it couldn’t be done. They said nobody could create a completely decentralized NBA season preview by way of 30 morsels of short-form video content. Well, they were wrong. With help from the good people of Defector, I have made 30 strange videos, one for every NBA team, previewing the upcoming NBA season. They are now all live in four places: the Defector Instagram, the Defector YouTube, my Twitter feed, and my TikTok page. Check them out on the platform of your choice, and tune in to this week’s Nothing But Respect to hear me and Patrick Redford talk a little bit about what it was like making them. Below are a few images that made their way into some of the videos, to give you a sense of what I was going for.

For months, I've seen Michigan basketball fans chortle ominously about the big personality of Yaxel Lendeborg, the super-senior who led the Wolverines' 2026 national championship run then sidled over to the NBA draft, where he was selected at No. 11 by the Golden State Warriors. They'd murmur something about him being blunt, being goofy, the world isn't ready for him, etc. Sure. I knew the backstory: Born to parents who had both played basketball for the Dominican Republic's national teams, Lendeborg barely participated in organized basketball for most of his schooling because he couldn't keep his grades up, preferring instead to play video games all day, and had no intention to play college ball until pushed by his mom to play in a showcase for Dominican players at the end of high school. His highlights there won him the last scholarship slot at Arizona Western College, and after a cumulative six seasons of college hoops, a first-round NBA draft selection, a Summer League MVP, and a strong preseason, he started at power forward in his NBA debut on Wednesday. A remarkable sequence of events. The Warriors targeted 24-year-old Lendeborg rather than taking a younger prospect, presumably because they wanted a fresh-out-of-the-box starter to retain a competitive team around Steph Curry. It's a noble thought, but at least one game in, with Jimmy Butler still months away from a return after ACL repair, and Kristaps Porzingis reportedly considering retirement due to chronic illness, the Warriors look dismal. While they were getting shredded by the Los Angeles Lakers, 127-105, Lendeborg exchanged lots of animated words and gestures with inveterate shit-talker Luka Doncic. Just before the halftime buzzer, Doncic banked in a half-court shot over Lendeborg, and the two resumed barking at each other.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. What could compel someone to spend four hours on a YouTube essay mostly about the rapper Killer Mike, a B-tier Dungeon Family affiliate who parlayed success as one half of Run The Jewels to become a B-tier rap A-lister? In truth, it is no worse than sitting through six hours of self-assigned Super Bowl performer Jay-Z and Rick Rubin yap about rap and also therapy. Or watching a three-hour documentary on disgraced Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in a hilariously, extremely sold-out theater. Or watching four hours of Nick Saban coaching propaganda. Or one hour of an ESPN soft-focus profile of Ben Simmons that tries to sidestep the question of Simmons’ work ethic. I watch a lot of nonsense, I guess it’s safe to say—and people are apparently greatly long-winded. Maybe a better question is: Who would actually be compelled to make a four-hour YouTube video on Killer Mike? For that answer, we’d have to get into who FD Signifier and Jared A. Ball are, and the importance of the latter’s book, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Then we would have to talk about black leftist politics and anticapitalist critique and how exactly we got to a point where a bunch of people think Killer Mike is at war with black activist streamers and content creators, and shooting at them in random freestyles.

This is not to discredit the existence of some underlying tactical or strategic calculations, and it is absolutely not extending credit to the shockingly vile creatures doing it, but when you see a reactionary candidate being disgusting, it is safe to assume that they are doing it because they really believe in it. The decade and change in which Donald Trump has been the main character in American public life has been a notably bad one for metaphor and subtext, among other things, but it has been a notably revealing one where some fundamental national political impulses are concerned. Trump himself is too dim and too brazen for that game's familiar euphemisms, and his inability or unwillingness to promise to deliver harm in the usual coded language was central to his political appeal. It was also novel enough to convince some people that he was interested in doing something other than inflicting that pain. This was true for partisans who thrilled at hearing him make explicit the implicit conservative value of hurting the most vulnerable people, and also to a significant faction of people without any other real values who mistook the brutal liberties that Trump has always taken for himself for ones that they would be able to enjoy themselves by supporting him. There is no other way to say it: Donald Trump inspired these people. He inspired them to be their worst and smallest and cruelest selves, but inspiration is a value-neutral thing. This is to say that he inspired those people to be more like him, and to live as he lives—in the indulgent certainty that even their puniest comfort or fleeting amusement or flash of childish anger was more important than anything or anyone else in the world, and then to behave accordingly. Many of these people surely had suspected as much already and moved through the world as if it were true; the carnage and stupid suffering that all that heedless, headlong motion produces is everywhere you look. Some of these people, inevitably, were going to run for political office. People like that will always be a danger to everyone around them, but it's at this point that they truly become everyone's problem. There is a world in which Vivek Ramaswamy is just one of the many millions of Americans—please do not think about how many there are, how many you have met and will someday meet—who just are like this, and move through their days with what even a layperson could diagnose as "walking malignant narcissism." But that alternate-universe Ramaswamy would be contained within some grim gated community and grim gated personal and business relationships; his capacity to do the damage such a person would invariably do would be limited to those unfortunate enough to wind up in his path. That Ramaswamy would also be an extremely odious man, a curdled being driven entirely by resentment and appetite. But very few people would ever know his name. That's the best-case scenario.

In 2000, midway through the first season of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin started posting on a discussion forum on the site Television Without Pity as “Benjamin,” his middle name. Specifically, he posted on the forum dedicated to discussing The West Wing. “Benjamin” was met with some initial skepticism, but after proving to their satisfaction that he really was the show’s creator, his interactions with fans were warm. They fawned over him, and he thanked them for watching. Things took a turn in 2001 when posters commented on Sorkin’s unseemly hogging of the mic in an acceptance speech for an Emmy he won with a co-writer, Rick Cleveland. The incident snowballed into full-fledged forum drama, with Sorkin and Cleveland trading lengthy, bitter replies; Sorkin eventually admitted he was wrong, apologized, and stopped posting. Later, when the site’s West Wing recaps took a more critical turn, he reappeared, angry and defensive, asking why the recapper was even bothering to watch the show and write about it if she didn’t like it. The site’s founder responded that the recapper was doing this because it was her job and they paid her. This was Sorkin’s first dance with the internet, and it seems to have left a mark. An entire storyline in a third-season West Wing episode is dedicated to White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman discovering a Josh Lyman fan forum and accidentally running afoul of its hostile, pajama-clad users. The forum’s moderator, who polices infractions like posting in the wrong thread or writing in all caps, is described by Josh as “a dictatorial leader who I’m sure wears a muumuu and chain-smokes Parliaments.” Sorkin’s next TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, careened between goofy comedy and somber drama as it struggled and ultimately failed to find its footing, but a consistent thread was the corrosive influence of the internet, manifested in everything from unscrupulous gossip bloggers to foreign terrorists posting hostage videos on YouTube. The Newsroom was similarly erratic in tone while even more laser-focused on the harm that the likes of Gawker and Twitter were causing to journalism, politics, and our very souls. In its unapologetically pro-elite credentialism, its score-settling attitude toward women, and its often deranged determination to offer Frank Capra-style uplift no matter the circumstances, the show remains the purest distillation of Sorkin’s fixations. In 2010, when The Social Network was released, the general public largely still trusted the tech industry. The iPhone felt futuristic. Facebook was still kind of cool. Today, depicting Silicon Valley as a malign force is cliché; 16 years ago, it was subversive. The alchemy of Sorkin’s collaboration with David Fincher—a non-obvious director for a quippy, dense script—resulted in a perfectly calibrated dark comedy warning us about the future of human interaction and the people bringing it into being. In the decade that followed, reality caught up to the film’s bleak outlook. The preoccupations that had once marked Sorkin as an aggrieved and out-of-touch Luddite now made him look improbably prescient. It makes sense that he would feel the urge to take a victory lap. 

There's a type of hate that's easy to love. It's the hate a downtrodden fanbase feels for a homegrown star who forced his way out, to a better or at least more glamorous situation. This hate is full and rich and multifaceted. It contains all the frustrations of decades of losing, of free agents spurning their team as a destination, of being a punchline for the rest of the league. It contains envy and resentment toward the idea that someone could just choose not to live or die with the fortunes of that benighted franchise. It contains disappointment in that departed star, for getting their hopes up and leaving them dangling. It contains a heart-tugging exasperation that gets deep into sports' very real ability to encapsulate the human condition: We loved you, it says. Why didn't you love us? Not since Long Island "welcomed" back John Tavares has there been a night of hockey hate like Brady Tkachuk's return to Ottawa on Wednesday. He may be Keith Tkachuk's garbage son, but for eight years he was Ottawa's garbage son, too, dammit. Ottawa's easy to root for from afar. They've dealt with more shit than any fanbase should be expected to. They weathered an evil and stupid owner, and threats of relocation. They've been the butt of the joke on the ice, failing to win a playoff series in the last decade and reaching one Final in their entire existence. Everyone dumps on their town, even, accidentally, their own mayor. Players don't want to live there. If they are to have their very own superstar, they have to make one. For the Senators' drawn-out trek into and then gradually out of the wilderness, that was Brady Tkachuk. Tkachuk makes a great bad guy. He already has the bearing and showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel, and the way he forced his way to Florida was genuinely villainous: quietly, on the mythical Team USA group chat, and publicly, on his podcast with his father and brother. (Tampering is an unenforceable rule, but it's insulting to not even try to pretend to follow it.) He's an avatar for the U.S.'s aggressive geopolitical little-brothering of Canada. He's unlikable as a person and infuriating as an opposing player. He is very fun to boo, and he is of the temperament to enjoy being booed.

There's a sequence from the first quarter of Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, in which the Atlanta Dream walloped the Golden State Valkyries by a score of 97-71, that would still be grinding my gears if I were a Valks fan. Angel Reese, fresh off her Game 2 masterpiece, started Game 3 aggressively, going right to the rim. She scored the first two points of the game on a nifty duck-in, and then tried to drive on Kiah Stokes on two straight possessions. Stokes blocked her both times, and then blocked a Jordin Canada layup. And then, with just over five minutes left in the quarter, Stokes was subbed out of the game. One of the most noticeable subplots of these Finals is what Reese is able to do when Stokes is and is not matched up with her. When defended by Stokes, she has sometimes struggled to reliably get off clean shots; against every other big on the Valks' roster, she has enjoyed a feast of layups and fouls. Things were no different on Wednesday night: As soon as Aminata Gueye subbed in for Stokes in the first quarter, Reese went straight at her for a bucket and a foul. When Stokes was subbed out again with 7:23 left in the second quarter, Reese got right back to work by hitting a three in Gueye's face and then bumping her out of the way for another layup. The Valkyries and Dream are stylistically similar in a number of meaningful ways, but one area where they diverge is their depth. Golden State has ridden its 10-player rotation to the Finals by believing in every player's ability to contribute, and by prioritizing meaningful amounts of in-game rest for the starters. The Dream, meanwhile, are happy to share minutes among just seven players. A deep roster full of talented players is the kind of thing that can help carry a team through the regular season and a long playoff run, but a dogmatic commitment to using a big rotation can make it harder to navigate that other all-important principle of playoff basketball: matchups.