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It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?

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 to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won’t linger on that washed-up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick’s official website. It’s a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick’s weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.

Last year, Defector’s operations geniuses submitted our annual Tip Jar drives for consideration in the Online Journalism Awards category of “Innovation in Revenue Strategy” for mid-size newsrooms. We did not win. The award instead went to the Kyiv Independent for “building a sustainable media business during war.” While we maintain that “sending David Roth to…

Here we go again. Serie A featured last season's best sprint to the finish, with a tight title race, an intense melee for the European spots, and a five-team relegation scrap. Napoli emerged as champions, Juventus snagged the last Champions League spot, and Empoli and Venezia got shot into hell (Serie B). It was a thrilling conclusion to a thrilling season. This season has started much in the same way both at the bottom and especially at the top, where the Italian league looks set to have yet another season-long battle royal. Through nine matches, Italy's top seven teams are separated by just six points, the second-tightest margin in Europe's top five leagues (France's Ligue 1 has a gap of only four points, but the financial and talent gap between Paris Saint-Germain and the rest robs that league of any real intrigue even when the Parisians don't win). Defending champion Napoli is still on top with 21 points, though it shares that spot with Roma, now helmed by former Atalanta manager and hipster darling Gian Piero Gasperini. Milans Internazionale and AC are right behind with 18 points each, and then Como (16 points) and Bologna (15) have the last two European spots in their grasp at the moment.

To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that across multiple fronts, I’m on the losing team. It is equally difficult not to be overcome by the anxiety that these battles might be marching through my neighborhood and up to my front door any day now. In an effort to preserve my sanity, I made the decision to “unplug” a couple weeks back—no news, no social media updates of egregious political dereliction and moral turpitude. My best friend since age 13 visited from Hawaii for my birthday, and we set about immersing ourselves in art. We started with a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday morning, where we were immediately greeted by white banners hanging ceiling to floor, one of which declared:

The freshwater flatworm Stenostomum brevipharyngium is, by all accounts, a simple fellow. The worm is small and entirely soft. It has no eyes, only sensory pits that control balance and orientation. This simplicity makes it easy for S. brevipharyngium to make more of itself in every way possible. The flatworm can regenerate major parts of its body, such as sensory organs and musculature, as well as make more worms via asexual reproduction. The most famous form of asexual reproduction might be budding, in which a new organism emerges from a "bud" on a parent like a new polyp emerging from a coral. But the way S. brevipharyngium sees it—which here is a turn of phrase, as the worms have no eyes—budding is for squares. These flatworms reproduce through a process called paratomy, in which an individual forms new organs inside their original body before splitting into two. This happens through a different molecular process than mere regeneration, in which a split worm regrows a head or a tail. In paratomy, the worm must obey its existing body axis—understanding which end of the original worm is the head and which is the tail so they can put their new tail and new head in the right places.

The last time the lasting historical footprint of a World Series was left by the losing team was the night of Carlton Fisk's waved-in homer in Game 6 of the 1975 series. The one before that came when the Chicago White Sox tanked the series for the sake of gamblers in 1919. In both those series, the team that won, Cincinnati and Cincinnati respectively, have been rendered afterthoughts after the fact. Such is our addiction to narrative; nothing is ever truly new—not even Terry Rozier. Now that the World Series is heading back to Toronto and the Blue Jays are closing in on the title nobody believed them capable of claiming, the Dodgers may be vying to join that list of overwhelming and historic losers. It was the Dodgers that won Game 3, or Games 3 and 3A, the 18-inning masterwork that ended with Freddie Freeman's homer just before midnight. That game gave us a lifetime of reminders about the joys of baseball; everything that has happened since has conspired to make it a quaint little curio.

All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over—when they break your heart—we want the details. We want to know that Taylor Swift left her scarf there at his sister’s house and that Alanis Morissette went down on him in a theater. We want to know every gory little piece of what happened to you. Show us the knife wound. Show us the knife.  Part of creating anything is understanding which parts of you are interesting to others, and Lily Allen knows that in a breakup what people want (be they friends or fans) is details. On Friday, with just a few days' warning, Allen dropped a 14-song, 44-minute album called West End Girl. It’s an ideal breakup album because it’s petty and unconcerned with fairness. It throws all the dirty laundry right out onto the street. 

On Oct. 19, American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky was found dead in his Charlotte, N.C. home. He was a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and his death, which police say is being investigated as a possible overdose or suicide, has rocked the chess world. The U.S. Chess Championships held a moment of silence in his memory, tributes poured in from every corner of the chess community, and International Chess Federation (FIDE) president Arkady Dvorkovich announced that his organization would establish a special prize in Naroditsky's honor. Making sense of such a tragedy is necessarily a delicate process, but in this case, it's particularly difficult because of the nasty, internecine campaign that former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, who Naroditsky idolized, had been waging against the young grandmaster. Naroditsky was a particularly beloved member of the chess community. His parents emigrated from the Soviet Union and raised him in the Bay Area, where he first made a name for himself before bursting onto the international scene when he won the U-12 World Championships. The championship win earned him the title of Master, and he ascended smoothly to International Master and Grandmaster by the time he was 18. Naroditsky regularly partook in U.S. Chess Championships, once beating top American player Fabiano Caruana, but his specialty was the fastest forms of chess on offer, and he was a distinguished player in blitz, bullet, and hyperbullet formats.

Wednesday night in Los Angeles, it was finally the Blue Jays' turn to benefit from a historic performance. They'd lost Game 2 of this World Series to an unhittable Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who put together nine innings of dominance the likes of which, by at least one measure, had not been seen in a World Series since before the launch of Sputnik. They'd lost a surreal Game 3 in which Shohei Ohtani socked two dingers and two doubles and reached base nine times in nine plate appearances, which has never happened before and is not likely to ever happen again, unless Ohtani someday does it himself. In their own wins, the Blue Jays had been normal—admirably normal—out there doing normal baseball things, simply put together in the right sequences. That Toronto's victories did not require anyone sprouting wings was encouraging, and helped to establish a sense that they'd been broadly the better team, even if the wins themselves were somewhat rudely overshadowed. The performance in Game 5 of rookie Blue Jays starting pitcher Trey Yesavage was not quite an Ohtani-level what the fuck is happening right now type of thing. Yesavage's 12 strikeouts were the most by a rookie in a World Series game in history. Yesavage, making his second start in this series, his fifth start of the postseason, and pitching on the road in a playoff game for the first time in his career, mowed his way through the Dodgers' lineup, making several of the game's biggest stars look overwhelmed and ridiculous along the way. His disgusting splitter, thrown from approximately the tropopause, induced seven swing-and-misses against just one ball in play; his slider, thrown from the same preposterous arm angle, induced a whopping 14 swing-and-misses. Just three of Yesavage's 104 pitches were hit hard and in play, per Statcast. One of them, launched by Kiké Hernandez into the stands in left in the bottom of the third inning, accounted for Yesavage's only run allowed in seven innings. Yesavage didn't even watch the ball fly out of there; two batters later, he used one of those dive-bombing splitters to make the best baseball player in the world look entirely foolish, and finished the inning. The Dodgers never came close to bothering him again.