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Before we get to the feud, let's start with the facts. Molly, the wooden crank-operated automaton made by the artist Bliss Kolb, is a beauty. Although Molly is made of basswood, cherry, and teak, with glass eyes and steel screws, its buttery yellow body and dusky brown wings recall the northern yellow warbler, a melodic whistling songbird found across the U.S. and Canada. Molly is a beautiful singer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZ4RysiN3A It is also true that Kelly Clarkson is a beautiful singer. Or maybe beautiful is understating it. Clarkson is considered one of the great vocalists of her generation and one of the greatest singers of all time. She instantly proved the premise of American Idol, that a reality show could, in fact, find the best singer in the nation (and arguably could have ended once they found her). For seven seasons, Clarkson belted out unbelievable covers during the "Kellyoke" segment of The Kelly Clarkson Show. Her performance of her most-requested song ever—"Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters, in the original, staggering key—features YouTube comments that are the dictionary definition of diva worship, for good reason.

The WNBA was staring down the following issue: After the first two games of the Finals, beginning Saturday at the raucous 18,064-seat building which the Golden State Valkyries have sold out for two straight years, the series would move to Atlanta, where the Dream’s primary arena, Gateway Center, seats just 3,500. The Dream have so far played their three home playoff games at the larger State Farm Arena, the approximately 17,044-seat venue where the Hawks play. (The two teams do not share an owner.) They also played five sellout games there in the regular season: two against the Las Vegas Aces, two against the Indiana Fever, and one against the Chicago Sky, Angel Reese's former team. Last week, the team announced that they’ll play all their home games at the larger venue beginning next season. But with a Sombr concert scheduled for the night of Game 3, and the Hawks home opener scheduled for the night of Game 4, it looked like the Dream might have to play these games in their usual smaller building—kind of a bummer for the WNBA Finals. WNBA teams have often been caught in such scheduling pickles. This year, the Valkyries got a Doja Cat concert bumped by a week when they made the Finals, but last year, they played their only home playoff game in San Jose because their home arena had already been booked for the Laver Cup. In 2021, the Phoenix Mercury bopped around alternate venues to start the playoffs because of a scheduling conflict with Disney on Ice. Later that postseason, when it seemed like the Mercury might again be displaced to accommodate a Lakers-Suns preseason game, the Suns moved their preseason game up a few hours and played the games as a doubleheader. On Sunday, USA Today reported that efforts to move the Finals games to even Georgia Tech’s 8,600-seat arena or another 13,000-seat arena nearby had “hit a roadblock.”

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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 bread heels, beer guts, gastropubs, Digger, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m off 'bag duty next week while I finish up a special feature assignment. But don’t worry; we’ll have a guest host ready to entertain your finest inquiries. Just hit up the funbag email address and they’ll be waiting for you. Your letters:

The NBA season is one week away, and there's one game I can't stop thinking about. On Nov. 2, Kawhi Leonard's Toronto Raptors will travel to Los Angeles to play the Clippers, his former team and the subject of the NBA's harshest-ever punishment over the cap shenanigans they did to sign him back in 2019. The spectacle of Leonard, back in L.A. in a Raptors uniform, will be so weird, and I'm curious to see how the basketball media will cover it. Speaking of basketball media, that's the true subject of this week's episode of Only If You Get Caught. If you've read Defector's coverage of the story, you're probably familiar with the many media angles to the scandal; how investigative podcaster Pablo Torre broke the story, how ESPN helped Clips owner Steve Ballmer run cover, and how the Worldwide Leader duffed its big scoop about a supposedly light punishment for the team. This is the most interesting part of this story, and on this week's episode, we pulled in Torre himself to talk it though and reflect on the role of the media in the whole saga. He spoke about whether he could have done this story at ESPN, what he makes of the theory that this is a mostly victimless "crime" that only really indicts the salary cap, and the potential conflicts of interest around an outlet charged with covering the league also paying them a ton of TV money. It was a fun episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcLPF0tAJ5Q

This past Friday, Christine Brennan asked to speak with an editor at Defector. The USA Today columnist's request was somewhat expected, since Giri Nathan had written about her in an article published two days earlier, the piece critical of her fixation with measuring the WNBA's success through the singular metric of Caitlin Clark. While writing his article, Giri had reached out to Brennan for comment on what her ideal strategy would be for the league to properly market the Indiana Fever's star player. But Brennan didn't reply to share her multi-point plan. Mostly she wanted to take umbrage with the post's headline: "Christine Brennan Has Fully Lost It Over Caitlin Clark." For the record, Giri emailed Brennan on Oct. 6, the day before the piece ran. He asked her, "If you were made WNBA commissioner tomorrow, what would be your five-point plan for running a league that has Caitlin Clark in it?" We published the following morning, and Brennan's response came in Wednesday night: Thank you for your email and my sincere apologies. This went to a spam folder and I just saw it now. As you might know, I’ve covered the WNBA since it began in the late 1990s and have fought very hard for it to get attention from the male-dominated mainstream sports media and national media for whom I work, including USA Today, CNN and ABC News. You can find a lot about my coverage of the WNBA and its incredible advocacy in my book, On Her Game: working to get BG home; being a month ahead of Colin Kaepernick protesting the killing of Black men; working to get Sen. Warnock elected, etc.  To have the opportunity now to get that attention and coverage is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. And then to witness the rudderless “leadership” of Cathy Engelbert at this crucial moment…well, that’s why I continue to speak out. As you can see on my social media and in my book, I believe the great Dr. Harry Edwards had it right about preparing for Caitlin Clark’s arrival. I also believe Adam Silver finally needs to engage; this is his legacy too. There are things big and small I’d love to speak with you about: for instance, immediate investigation of the messages Kelsey Mitchell and other players say they are receiving. That should be the highest priority of the new commissioner: investigate everything happening to the players and take the appropriate action. As we know, that happened with Clark’s stalker, who is now in jail. Also, the W needs a transgender policy. As I’ve said on some recent podcasts, it is the only major sports league or organization without one, as far as I know, which creates the massive controversy we’ve seen the past few months. The W needs to address this issue. It’s not easy but the commissioner needs to be taking this on, not leaving it to the players.

The practice of surrogacy can be said to date back to the Bible; in Genesis 16, Abram is promised descendants by God, but his wife Sarah is unable to conceive. Sarah then instructs Abram to lay with her handmaid, who is then able to bear his child and fulfill God’s promise. This story begins at the issue of infertility. Yet the practice today has evolved to address a myriad of motivations: the pro-natalism push, the desire to preserve one’s body, gay couples endeavoring to start a family. The heightened demand for surrogates has fueled a robust industry, including reduced-cost options via agencies that have sourced surrogates specifically in “countries blighted by poverty”. One novel motivation for using a surrogate that has emerged is that of some form of careerism. Celebrities like Lucy Liu, who cited the pace of her career as her reason, have welcomed children via surrogates. Carrying and delivering your own children is beginning to join the ranks of services that can be outsourced to others out of sheer convenience.  Sarah Anderson’s shrewd, satirical debut novel Fallow follows a woman named Natalie who is employed at a workplace grievance call center. She comes across a mysteriously lucrative opportunity: a position with a tech company called “The Company” offering a “GENEROUS SALARY WITH BENEFITS,” the only apparent requirements being a “healthy lifestyle, birthing hips, and discretion.” After a few white lies regarding substance use in the job interview, Natalie receives an offer from The Company to participate in their Genesis program. The program was conceived by The Company to combat the decreased emotional investment and productivity associated with maternity leave, allowing for female executives to instead employ an in-house surrogate. Natalie’s contract renders her responsible for seven viable pregnancies over the course of 10 years, while not disclosing the nature of her vocation to any of her personal associates. At the end, she is entitled to up to $60,000 in desired “reconstructive” surgery. Natalie, dazzled by the salary and the idea of freedom from the tedium of conventional work, signs the contract.  Natalie’s existence goes on to consist of becoming an optimal body to carry the babies of various female executives. She spends her days walking “aimlessly” on her treadmill, getting driven to the doctor, chiropractor, and acupuncturist, watching foreign language films for the fetus to internalize. Her first pregnancy and delivery go smoothly, largely unconcerning up to her physical postpartum symptoms of hives and severe body odor, which abate after a few weeks until she feels like a “looser, wetter version of herself.” An employee thanks Natalie, bemoaning her first terrible first pregnancy and her “relief” towards Genesis as a program. 

The technical term for them is Transient Luminous Events, and it's a good term. Transient, because they last just a few milliseconds. Luminous, because they light up the sky, but also because they invoke the radiant immanence of an old-testament manifestation. Events because—well, imagine you saw this. You would agree this was an Event. The most commonly observed TLE is a red sprite, an enormous electrical discharge shooting upward from thunderstorm clouds, usually a blood-red color due the excitation of nitrogen atoms. Below is one of the finest images of sprites ever recorded, by nature photographer Florian Riou last month: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1japWjrkl/

I like to imagine a wised-up contrarian reading Ray Ratto's blog about the Milwaukee Brewers' Game 1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, which identifies a formula in the way the Brew Crew are progressing through the National League playoffs. It's not a vague, vibes-based formula that Ratto describes, either: He says Milwaukee's opponent scores first "but cannot make a big inning out of its opportunity;" he says the Brewers "catch up quickly" and then nose ahead; he says Milwaukee's starter "goes four innings" and then hands it over to Milwaukee's bullpen; he says the bullpen slams the door, making a narrow margin on the scoreboard feel approximately as vast and daunting as a snow-bound glacier-capped mountain range. I like to think of this hypothetical smirking contrarian—I even have the face and voice of a former shit-eating acquaintance in mind as I type this—rolling their eyes at this so-called "formula." Sure, but this is baseball, and there's too much variance in baseball for formulas, says our contrarian, then somehow wedges the word "orthogonal" and a reference to Ayn Rand into an unwanted sermon on randomness and regression. I like to imagine this contrarian then watching Milwaukee's 7–4 victory in Game 2 and becoming so flustered and irritated by the process and outcome that they call out of work the next two days, just to delay their own reckoning. It was downright spooky how closely the Brewers followed their formula Monday night. The Dodgers scored runs in the first and third innings, each time to go up a run, but failed in both cases to extend and exploit their opportunities, both times when an observably unwell Shohei Ohtani made the third out. The Brewers answered both runs with runs of their own, yoinking momentum back their way and chipping away at Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who needed 25 pitches to get out of the first inning and another 22 pitches to record the first two outs of the third. Milwaukee nosed ahead on a two-out, two-run third-inning single to center, and chased a gassed Yamamoto from the game. Milwaukee's own starter, Logan Henderson, completed the requisite four solid innings but gave back the lead at the start of the fifth, and was yanked. The Dodgers again failed to put together a sustained rally, and the Brewers immediately countered with another run of their own.

At times it really does feel like time is moving faster than ever, and even things that happened a year ago might as well have happened 10 years ago. But it is important to maintain perspective, and understand that time and history have to play their parts before we can properly recognize moments for what they meant at the time they happened. With that said, it can feel a little strange to begin reevaluating the legacy of Nick Saban, football coach, and the Saban era of Alabama football a mere three years after his surprise retirement from the team and college football in general. The man is just started getting comfortable as on-air ESPN talent, finding time to evaluate games and banter with human Red Bull can Pat McAfee, in between his actual work as minister of propaganda for archaic college sports bills. The truth is we aren’t removed enough from the Saban era to understand what his time there meant for the sport, that particular team, or the city of Tuscaloosa at large. But the content machine needs to eat constantly in order to maintain value for an increasingly shrinking number of investors, and so it must be fed. So Nick Saban, come on down for your glossy, incredibly long, fussy, overproduced, myth-making, hagiographic sports documentary project. The new six-part ESPN documentary, Saban, is the officially authorized story of Nick Saban as championship coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, alongside some other stops at Toledo, Michigan State, and a national championship at LSU. If you’ve watched enough modern sports documentaries, and Lord knows we have, then you already know what to expect: a lot of inspiration-core, thinly veiled sponcon in which the product is the star of the documentary themselves.