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Generally you would not want to use a word like "catharsis" in relation to a podcast. That is just not what they are for, in my opinion, and it's not really in my range as a podcast co-host or guest to deliver that sort of experience. While last week's episode announcing the end of The Distraction was decently cathartic for me, that was never the point. Of course the final episode of the podcast would be significant for us, and inevitably include a decent amount of Looking Back At All We've Accomplished and such, but part of the reason we invited original co-host Tim Marchman back was to get back to basics before slipping the surly bonds forever. You already know what that means: free association, good-natured muttering, and heated takes about radishes. It's not catharsis; it's something much dumber and more powerful than that. We got the nostalgia stuff out of the way in the first half of the episode, although there was still plenty of vintage nonsense in there between our precious memories of embarrassing moments, famous guests, barking dogs, and the janky prehistory of the podcast during its decade of neglect under our former corporate parents. We swapped stories about our encounters with a leather-encased Buzz Bissinger, and remembrances of Tim Curry, including both his escape to the one place that isn't corrupted by capitalism (space) and his legendary movie-demon performance. We also talked about the unfortunate impact that extended periods of podcasting can have on one's professional legacy and self-image, remembered Chris Bosh getting yoinked off his podcast appearance before things got too stupid, and addressed the Toilet Sandwich Question one last time. If you remember me at all, I hope it will be as I described myself in this segment.

Across the 2024 and 2025 NWSL seasons, Temwa Chawinga scored 35 goals, more than many players could hope to score in their entire careers. She won the Golden Boot and MVP both years, and deserved to. The Kansas City Current forward was simply inevitable. There’s a real pleasure in watching an athlete like Chawinga, who provides the near certainty that if you flip on a game they’re playing in, they'll do something that knocks your socks off. Scoring is the hardest thing to do in soccer, not to mention doing it with such consistency and for so long. Chawinga’s scoring pace over the last two years left little doubt that she’d sweep the league’s end-of-season awards.  This year, we’ve been treated to nine goals from Chawinga so far, putting her at an astounding rate of 1.06 goals per 90 minutes played. That she’s kept up her scoring is all the more impressive considering that Kansas City is nowhere near as good of a team as they have been the last two campaigns; she’s able to put a team on her back and not feel the weight of it. 

Good science journalism is by its nature suspicious of grand or outlandish claims. Good science journalism does not take press releases at face value, but rather investigates the evidence behind those claims and the context in which they appear. Good science journalism is more interested in the truth behind big promises, or at least the likelihood of said promises coming true. By contrast, bad science journalism functions as a hype machine, regurgitating company statements verbatim as if it were the New York Times quoting Israel's Ministry of Defense. Bad science journalism runs with shocking claims precisely because they are shocking, because shock drives clicks, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a headline. I've written about the problematic nature of this type of coverage around mammoth claims of de-extinction, such as when Time and the New Yorker both published headlines claiming that the dire wolf has returned. (Reader, it has not.) Although Colossal gives SpaceX a run for its money when it comes to sensationalism, other less technologically glitzy fields are less prone to sensational slop and arbitrary timelines; zoology is not promising a new monkey by 2027. In fact, I'd wager that space science, with its reliance on otherworldly technology and billionaire braggadocios, might be the most vulnerable to this kind of bad journalism. To this point, I recently and wholeheartedly agreed with this exchange between cosmologist Katie Mack and science journalist Dave Levitan.

Some people are fans of the Buffalo Bills. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Buffalo Bills. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: It was an interception. Get over it. Your 2025 record: 12-5. As always, Buffalo's dominant regular season meant nothing. In fact, that gaudy 12-5 record wasn't enough to keep the hated New England Patriots from wresting the AFC East crown away from the Bills after five years atop the division. Those same Patriots would go on to play in the Super Bowl, and in just the second year of their young quarterback's career. They might play in—and win!—many more Super Bowls after this. Meanwhile the Bills have had one of the best QBs in the sport for many years and yet still can't navigate their way through the AFC playoff field without tying their dick in a knot.

So who believes in Reds Week? The Reds, you fools. The Cincinnati Freaking Reds. And all the rest of you cynical apostates do too. If you didn't know it before, you damned well know it now. And not just for historical, electoral, or tonsorial reasons, either. We're talking the here and now, because Defector is in constant communion with the gods of sport, and we get results. Proof? Proof, you ask? Try this: The Cincinnati Reds, our adopted baseball team until closing time tomorrow, did something that simply doesn't happen, ever. The only reason that it happened is because they felt our devotion and the power of our unified medullae oblongatae and rose to the moment. Also because the San Francisco Giants' bullpen blows half-chewed food all down its shirtfront on a regular basis, but that's not the way we're going to frame it. We know a good story when we make one up. Anyway, here's what the Reds did Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco: They built a seemingly insurmountable 3-9 deficit over eight full innings, in a game so riveting that the announced attendance of 24,130—itself one of the lowest at a Giants home game in this century, COVID conditions excepted—headed toward the street, the buses, the ferry boats, and the waiting fleet of embittered Lyft drivers before the ninth began, confident that they at least saw these utterly abject Giants earn their first three-game series sweep of the season ... until this happened.

This is Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week, we're discussing Taylor Swift's 2012 pop-rock hit Red. Patrick Redford: I can’t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there’s a sound at the end of the first synth swell in “I Knew You Were Trouble” that sounds just like the jail-cell door slamming closed in Akon’s “Locked Up,” right? Lauren Theisen: I primarily remember the screaming goat remix.

The actor Tim Curry died on Tuesday. He was 80. He was as purely and consistently fun a screen presence as anyone else I can think of, a cartoon of a performer, with outrageous charisma and the ability to communicate it through a wild assortment of constraints: obscuring makeup, heavy prosthetics, voice acting, shitty scripts, amateurish productions, small roles. When Tim Curry was in something, it had at least one delightful and magnetic thing in it. Curry most famously portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, after having substantially created the character in Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show stage production. It's tempting to call this his breakout role—it's incredibly famous now, and it was his debut film performance—but Rocky Horror wasn't a hit on its initial release, and nearly a decade elapsed before Curry landed anything like a starring screen role again. Later, among a ton of other credits, he played Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It; Wadsworth the butler, roughly 90 percent of what makes 1985's Clue worth watching; and Long John Silver in 1996's Muppet Treasure Island, a performance that earned him honorary Muppethood. Among a crazy number of stage credits, he portrayed Mozart when the play Amadeus came to Broadway and received a Tony nomination for it. But Frank-N-Furter will always be the role with which he is most closely associated. Curry's performance in Rocky Horror is astounding. He is by miles the funniest thing in a movie that also includes O'Brien's singing and dancing as Riff Raff during the "Time Warp" sequence, which sends me into convulsions even now that I've seen it probably close to 15 times. He is by miles the sexiest thing in a movie that features an all but totally undressed Susan Sarandon begging a fully lubed-up Peter Hinwood to fuck her. He is by far the most energetic and unhinged musical performer in a movie that features Meat Loaf with brain-surgery stitches around his forehead screaming the phrase "Hot patootie!" roughly 200 times while driving a motorcycle in a circle. You cannot take your eyes off of him during any moment he is on the screen. It rightly, if belatedly, made Curry a legend.

As with some of my best decisions in life, I bought a red light mask because Kelsey McKinney uses one. I saw Kelsey posting Instagram stories with her face illuminated under the mask's sinister, Sith-like glow. I was newly 30, albeit not especially flirty or thriving, and I wondered if the red light mask might be a good salve for my anxious vanity. Like many others, I want to grow old but still look young—sue me! Every morning I dutifully smear sunscreen on my face, and every night I apply my cocktail of arbitrarily chosen unguents. But if there was something else I could be doing more to stave off spots and wrinkles, I wanted to give it a try. Now that I've had my red light mask for a year, I see that it works, I think? My skin looks good, perhaps even better than it would without the mask. But I sometimes wonder if this is all in my head. Have I convinced myself that red light works simply because I want it to? Every time I put on my mask, strapping my face under its white silhouette like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, I find myself discombobulated, also like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. The logic feels crazy. I understand that light has the power to burn my skin. But the power to preserve it? This wager feels far more fantastical. Even scientists seemed to agree. In one 1989 paper, the biophysicist Tiina Karu, who studied the cellular mechanics of red light exposure, called the therapy "highly incredible and even mysterious." When I tried to learn about the science behind red light's dermatological dazzle, what I found were mostly affiliate-driven product recommendations, which taught me more about the luxuries of various masks but less about the science behind them. So I reached out to some actual dermatologists to see if they could unmask the secrets of my mask. Here is some of what I learned.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In the music video for "Time 4 Sum Aksion," the second single from Redman's debut album, you don't really get much of the zany personality that would go on to make him a cultural icon over the ensuing decades. Redman emerged first as a hardcore rapper, combining street tales and golden-age hip-hop swagger with reggae and Parliament Funkadelic attributes. On 1992's Whut? Thee Album, the fresh-faced kid from Newark is full of outlandish, aggressive bravado, backed by one of rap's production heavyweights, Erick Sermon. It makes for an album that is sonically adventurous, sampling a range of artists that includes James Brown, Funkadelic, and the Mary Jane Girls, all the while bringing raw and punchy pulp fiction the whole time. He is every bit deserving of being prime Mike Tyson's ring entrance music. https://youtu.be/NiZMqVXVZgA?si=rAXI9UVOQuMZXMwb

If in the future my daughter develops some kind of Pavlovian response to the musical stylings of Pat McAfee, I'll blame the editors who "assigned" this review. But this outcome is unlikely. I almost wish it were a little more plausible. McAfee's debut album, though enticingly titled Diary of a Polarizing Figure, was not powerful enough to polarize any part of my household. If only it had been more stupid, or ugly, or idiosyncratic enough to spark emotion, because in the end it was the musical equivalent of A.J. Hawk's uncannily smooth face. In the same way that McAfee the ESPN commentator has risen to meet the exact needs of the cultural moment—reddish men yapping indefinitely about sports, gambling, and vaccines, to the detriment of traditional journalism and neurons nationwide—McAfee the musician also meets listeners right where they are. Though the former NFL player has claimed that the album he released earlier this month was culled from 20 years of songwriting in private, it is music perfectly matched to the sound of the moment: a congealed country-trap, with skittering snares, gospel touches and autotuned vocals—the soundtrack of Reels America. Sharp critics have tried to understand the genesis of this ubiquitous new genre, but thinking too hard about it makes me feel ill. I tend to see it as the algorithmic stream carving out the path of least resistance. It's music that does barely anything for anybody, but harmlessly rolls off everybody, and can be played anywhere across the land. It's the sound of getting heat stroke on someone's rented boat. It's the reason you know Jelly Roll as anything but a bakery treat. It's the music that's on in your pickup truck, but also at the pump where you stopped to get gas, and again inside the convenience store you entered to restock on Zyn, and then again as you resume driving on the interstate while swiping through short-form vertical video and betting the spread.