NowLoop

When Emerson Jaquish’s mother decided 10 years ago to get a saluki, the contract for the dog said that the canine needed to be “shown.” In other words, if they were to buy the dog, they would be contractually obligated to enter it at dog shows. So at the age of 9, Emerson entered into the ring for the first time, showing her family dog. She began to learn showdog handling from renowned dog trainer Jody Davidson, who trained many of the junior-level handlers in Arizona. From there, she excelled, eventually qualifying for the Westminster Dog Show several times in the Junior Showmanship category. Ten years on, Emerson is still in the ring, although she typically shows dachshunds now. Dog shows have become her life. She works as an assistant handler under Erin Karst, a professional handler. She attends online college, which gives her the flexibility to work full-time for Karst. “I try to get all my schoolwork done on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, so that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I can focus on the dog shows,” Emerson tells me. I ask her to estimate how much time she spends getting ready for attending dog shows each week. She laughs. “All of it? It’s one big, continuous loop, pretty much.” At the average show, she and Karst manage around a dozen dogs.

On Sept. 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore fired two bullets at then-President Gerald Ford. They were in San Francisco, outside a hotel. Moore missed her first shot, but seeing an opportunity, took another. She missed that one, too. An ex-Marine named Oliver Sipple, who was behind her in the crowd, tackled Moore before she could try for a third. “I said, the bitch has got a gun,” he later recounted.  Forty years later, after serving 32 years of her life sentence in federal prison and being released on parole, a CNN journalist asked Moore, “What drove you to try to assassinate President Ford?” The same question is at the heart of Robinson Devor’s documentary Suburban Fury, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2024 and is slated for a wider theatrical release this year. Over the course of several interviews with Moore, the film aims to illuminate the particular set of conditions—state of mind, political belief, personal history, sense of purpose—that drove Moore, who died last year at the age of 95, to pick up a gun and fire it at the president. Suburban Fury opens with a title card informing us that Moore agreed to participate on the condition that no other interviews were conducted. From the first, we are trapped in her claustrophobic perspective, on which Devor leans to evoke the atmosphere of paranoia that accompanies Moore’s narration. He shoots her through panes of glass, alone in the backseat of a car, in an empty living room. Revisiting important landmarks of the assassination attempt, such as the hotel ballroom where Moore was interrogated after being caught, Devor explicitly borrows from the master of the American paranoid political thriller, Alan J. Pakula: Moore’s diminished figure, a speck against austere right angles, is reminiscent of Woodward and Bernstein clambering up the steps to the Library of Congress in All the President’s Men (1976). These framings contrast with Moore’s labyrinthine, even incoherent, description of her journey from every-woman to would-be assassin. The film announces, basically, that any semblance of order is just that. 

If you are anything like I once was, you moved through life feeling pretty sure you were not going to get scammed. You had an eye for the desperation of a fake Craigslist posting. You were attuned to the strange formatting of a phishing email. You had not even written a book intriguing enough to attract the attention of the mysterious book thief. But then hubris got my ass, as it is wont to do, and somehow I ended up inputting my debit card information into a fake USPS website and losing around $600 in many installments of $19.99 to a man named Maurice in Georgia. (Hey, at least I didn't get scammed by a cat.) No species is above a scam, or above getting scammed. Two recently published papers bring news of particularly creative scams that, as a bystander, made me chuckle. And now I will share them with you! I recognize my privilege here. Perhaps I would not find these scams so charming if I were the bird or bee in question. As such, the pages of Defector remain open to any victims of said scams who would like to share their stories. Please direct all pitches to berry@defector.com.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. Max B has been home from jail for a little less than six months now. It's been a pleasure to watch him gallivant around the city, making up for all the lost time. https://youtu.be/xfn-eba0spM?si=YDgM9GyD5si9vgBd

The death of Dilbert creator Scott Adams in January at age 68 was followed by obituaries with a predictably wide range in tone. While some were charitable to the late cartoonist, most were less forgiving. Adams’s long leap into infamy on the back of countless racist, sexist, transphobic, and antisemitic statements, and his close association with right-wing politics, cost him dearly while he was still alive, including the eventual cancelation of his comic strip from most of the country’s remaining newspapers. The last decade of Adams’s life was a public and often bizarre downward spiral, culminating in feuds with some of the alt-health quacks who gave him medically unsound advice after his prostate cancer diagnosis. Most of the obits were dedicated to rehashing these late-career follies, only occasionally straying to examinations of his artistic legacy.  I find myself interested in Adams damaging and/or capitalizing upon his artistic legacy in a different era: at the height of the strip’s popularity. In the late 1990s, Adams undertook tireless efforts to commercialize the Dilbert brand. From the highly successful Office Depot ad campaign to a million coffee mugs to lunchboxes to rubber masks to the ill-fated Dilberito—available in “Mexican” and “Indian” flavors!—Adams was a relentless promoter. Among the franchise detritus, one particularly intriguing tidbit has caught the attention of obscure media aficionados: a supposedly lost, live-action Dilbert sitcom pilot, which Adams wrote and directed for the Fox network. Numerous articles have identified the pilot as lost media, but are light on details. A ghastly Dogbert animatronic puppet is the only artifact from the pilot that has made it into public view; it was featured on a segment of a local PBS station’s B-movie happy hour, having somehow landed in the collection of a movie prop museum in Florida. 

NEW YORK — In the days before the Westminster Dog Show, I could not stop saying the phrase "33 Pomeranians." There’s a pleasing rhythm to the phrase—better spelled out as thirty-three Pomeranians—that lends itself to any multitude of cadences. Excitedly: thirty-three Pomeranians! As matter-of-fact as one might say 101 Dalmatians: thirty-three Pomeranians. Baffled and/or aghast: thirty-three Pomeranians? This was, of course, because there were 33 Pomeranians in attendance at the Westminster Dog Show, though the Pomeranian participation metrics still did not quite match up to the delegations of Retrievers, Golden (52), or French Bulldogs (48!), or Chihuahuas, of both Long Coat (23) and Short Coat varieties (18). Which is a way of saying that there’s no getting over the absurdity of, as the official press release says, 3,000 CHAMPION DOGS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD TO COMPETE AT THE HISTORIC 150th WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW. Champion, in this case, means a dog that has obtained at least 15 points in competition, with two major wins under different judges. The Westminster Dog Show is a competition of champions—to participate is to already be a winner, though of course there are always bigger horizons.

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. Late afternoon football is the best football. The NFL regular season can make you forget this evergreen fact, because the 4 p.m. slot is custom-made for viewers to steal a nap while one shitty AFC West team battles another. But then the playoffs arrive, and you and I are reminded of what makes twilight football—outdoors and on grass—special. You start off in broad daylight as both teams fuck around for a quarter or two. Then the sun slowly begins to bleed away, taking all distractions along with it as it sinks below the horizon. Now we’re in primetime, when everyone is watching. Now every player on the field is in the spotlight, and you, the viewer at home, are dialed in. Our long afternoon’s journey into night is over, and shit is starting to get intense. Shit is starting to matter. Also, it’s cocktail hour.

The understanding that we have reached when we've talked about it, to the extent we've talked about it at all, is that The Distraction should try to be a good hang even in bad times. This is dependent, of course, on the extent to which Drew and I are capable of managing that, and also relative to how bad the times in question are. We are, in every facet and on every front, in a real test of how well we can follow through on that goal at this moment. The general thrust of The Bad Times, you are no doubt familiar with; we have written about them at the site and talked about them in every episode of 2026, but also presumably you have a phone, or a window. But also, as you read this, much of the Defector staff is in Philadelphia for the funeral of our friend and Defector co-founder Dan McQuade. We have celebrated his life and work on the site in the week since he passed. There is a massive team-written remembrance of him on our front page right now; last night, some of us told stories about him in a bar in Philadelphia while "November Rain" played on the jukebox, which was both moving and kind of preposterous in a way I think he might have found funny. A lot of things have felt like that of late. This episode is like that, too.

Today is Dan McQuade’s funeral. To celebrate our friend, we wanted to give the people he worked with a place to explain what they loved so much about him. If you would like to support Dan’s widow Jan, and his son Simon, you can do so here. David Roth, Defector Editor Dan was always into…

NEW YORK — “I don’t think that bitch looks fit,” a woman next to me murmurs. She’s carrying a Louis Vuitton bag, wearing Hermes riding boots, and speaking, of course, about one of the three female Cane Corsos still in the ring. It’s not exactly an unwarranted thing for her to say; she does have a dog in this fight. Two, to be precise. The two fitter bitches both belong to her. With the way the judge has physically sorted the field, it’s clear that a male is about to be picked Best of Breed, and that means the likelihood of one of her dogs winning Best of Opposite (the award given to the best dog of the opposite sex) is pretty high. Like many of the women around me, the Cane Corso owner is wearing a tweed suit. As I’ve learned from many handlers over the course of two days, those suits speak to the prestige, perfectionism, and traditionalism of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. It matters if the bitch is fit because that’s the name of the game. Sure, many of these dogs are born perfect; high-level breeders can often tell from puppyhood if a dog has potential to become show ready. They have to be champions just to get to Westminster. But in order to stand out here, at the “Super Bowl of Dog Shows,” the dogs need every edge they can get: a freshly cleaned coat that is maintained every few minutes, flawless posture, and, yes, a handler that has strategized their outfit around the canine they’ll be presenting.