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 eating with your mouth open, Epstein fuckery, extended TV title sequences, and more.

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This week on Nothing But Respect we were joined by the boys from You Know Ball for a special home-and-home podcast series. Part 1, which you can find below, was in theory dedicated to the question of which teams this season are cool. I say in theory because we had to first get through an extended Luka Garza segment, a lengthy appreciation of Tyrese Maxey and V.J. "MJ Edgecombe" Edgecombe, and a brief look at the dire state of the New Orleans Pelicans. We then had a discussion around my admittedly vague prompt to name some cool teams as to how to even define that term in the first place. It was a fun one.

Harry and I will be recording Part 2 later this afternoon, where we will be discussing the obverse of this episode's question and conducting a survey of the teams with the worst vibes.

We first meet Izzy Gently, the protagonist of Joshua Wheeler’s captivating debut novel, The High Heaven, as a child. She is alone, wounded, and wandering. The year is 1967, and disaster has befallen the doomsday cult in which she’s grown up after the local Sheriff’s office r...

This late stage of Alexander Ovechkin's NHL career has been a lesson in conservation. As Ovi skates through his first season since turning 40, comfortable in his reign as the league's all-time king of goals, his play feels like it's taken on a certain regal quality. He is gr...

Lance Armstrong is a name synonymous with cheating. The brash Texan stole American hearts by winning seven consecutive Tours de France beginning in 1999, only to break them all a few years later by confessing to doping and having all seven titles stripped. That is the broad ...

Down 15 points in the fourth quarter, deep in their own territory, facing first and 11 after a false start penalty, the Las Vegas Raiders ran a plunge into the line. It went worse than you might expect.

It is worth pausing here to mention that the Dallas Cowboys are a joke. This once-proud franchise, winners of five Super Bowls, is now known for loud and expensive mediocrity even in years when they manage to win a playoff game. They have not won consecutive playoff games in 30 years, and two years ago their season ended on one of the funniest plays of all time. On Monday night they led the Raiders 31-9 going into the fourth quarter. If there were any NFC East team that could blow that lead… well, it’d be the Giants. But the Cowboys are a close second.

There's no discounting the very real possibility that the best, coolest, most emotionally affecting moment of the entire soccer season has already happened. The moment in question came in a match contested by two solid but unexceptional teams, both of which are entirely devo...

On Monday, Vanity Fair published the first excerpt of Olivia Nuzzi's monograph to sexting with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a book titled American Canto. The book, as Nuzzi claimed in a glamorized profile published in The New York Times, was written almost entirely on her phone while she was hiking, and this excerpt appears to be robust proof of this claim. Here is Nuzzi's introduction to RFK Jr., a man who, perhaps in some millennial allegiance to J.K. Rowling—another powerful woman under the delusion that she has been cancelled—she refuses to name:

I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that.

Poking through the 20,000-plus pages of emails from Jeffrey Epstein's inbox that were released by the House Oversight Committee last week can be a destabilizing experience. If there's one exchange that best evokes the sickly feeling that comes from spending too much time rea...

Conor Benn dominated familiar and familial foe Chris Eubank Jr. on Saturday in front of another sold out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium crowd in London. Seconds after the bell for the 12th and final round of the bout, Benn was being carried around the ring on the shoulders of his...

Like the ebb and flow of the tides or the migratory patterns of seabirds, there is an almost pleasant regularity to the recurrence of the Draymond Green Incident. Not that the Incidents are ever pleasant themselves, merely that the metronomic reliability of Green expressing ...

It was a crucial situation in the NFL’s marquee game of the week. The Lions had been unable to do anything on offense, but their defense had played well enough to keep them within a score of the reigning Super Bowl champions. Then the Lions finally did it. They broke through with a big play. And then the refs called a bullshit penalty.

The worst call in the Eagles’ 16-9 win over the Lions wasn’t the pass interference call on Detroit CB Rock Ya-Sin that iced the game with two minutes left. And that was an awful call! Lions fans should spend all week whining about it on either Costa & Jansen with Heather or The Mike Valenti Show with Rico. It was such a bad call that my dad texted me that he agreed with Cris Collinsworth’s assessment that, if anything, it was offensive pass interference on AJ Brown.

Before the pandemic, Zakiya Gibbons was everywhere, all the time. Whenever I saw her, she was on her way to another engagement she’d double stacked that day. She’s a people person. A textbook extrovert. But she lived alone during the pandemic, and like a lot of people, all t...

As UEFA qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup come to a close this week, the quality of the automatically qualified teams is high. So far, England and France, two perennial tournament favorites, have won their groups handily—the former allowed zero goals in eight matches, and th...

The comfort of rooting for a baseball team like the New York Yankees or Philadelphia Phillies is that even when they putter out of the playoffs in humiliating fashion, as they did this season, fans can still grasp a general idea of what next year will look like. The baseball...

Ja'Marr Chase of the Cincinnati Bengals spit on Jalen Ramsey of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not because he'd taken a swig of water to flush his mouth and then turned to the side and, oops, oh Gosh, sorry, some of that got on the other guy, yikes. Also not because he was talking...

The CFL team in Saskatchewan is called the Roughriders, and today that name refers to the rough hangover that they're going to have to ride out after Sunday night's victory celebrations. In a Grey Cup game that looked like it was going to be a comfortable win, then became ve...

This week's puzzle was constructed by Mat Holmes and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Mat is a teacher in Maine and a crossword constructor who is thrilled to be back in Defector. This puzzle was inspired by his longtime love and co-solver Hazel, but probably not ...

I’ve seen enough of J.J. McCarthy. On a weekend where draftmates Bo Nix and Drake Maye assumed full command of the AFC, there was the Vikings quarterback playing football as if he had acute lead poisoning. I’m gonna try to describe McCarthy’s performance in the space below, ...

As a tactician, Dan Campbell is best-known and best-loved for leading with his face. No hill too high, no risk too great, no goofy idea gone untried—that's in considerable part how he made the Detroit Lions one of the best and indisputably the most charming team in the NFL. ...

The Miami Dolphins have been given every reason to throw in the towel for the year. The general manager who assembled them, Chris Grier, is fired; their coach, Mike McDaniel, is a dead man walking; their quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, has not only played terribly throughout th...

I have cooked lasagna, conservatively, 12 or 15 times in my life. That's probably not a big number relative to, like, I dunno, a Bolognese nonna or whatever, but it's certainly enough times to have gotten the gist of the enterprise. If I am not (and I am not) a Lasagna Maste...

The Texas A&M Aggies played the South Carolina Gamecocks on Saturday, in what only a very few, who may not have witnessed it, are calling a "football game." It was more accurate to describe it as an assault on the senses, an exercise in how not to conduct yourself on a football field from both teams in each half.

https://youtu.be/7DcEb9bIf_U?si=bcr_OlN-nMG5Vzt-

The prefight of the year already has been fought. Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. both made weight Friday in London for their Saturday night rematch at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. As the size of the venue hints, this is a massively anticipated event in England. The actual fight will have a hard time competing with its backstory. 

Backstories, rather. This thing’s got story lines for the ages. Among them: A rematch for the middleweight belt! Will Eubank's détente with his dad (and former trainer) hold through the final bell? These fighters just plain don’t like each other, but their fathers don’t like each other even more after their own set of legendary boughts in the 1990s! There's even an angle involving Neymar.

A game recap of Wednesday's 131-95 victory, published on Celtics.com and NBA.com, praised Boston's leading scorers Payton Pritchard and Derrick White, in that order. That led to an unfortunate headline, which Memphis Grizzlies beat writer Sharon Shy Brown captured in a timely screenshot on Thursday:

Hello and happy Friday! We're getting ready to wind things down for the week, so spend some time asking us questions in the comments section. See ya down there.

Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender...

"The New York Jets" is hardly the phrase you begin a story with if you want to inspire a reader to embrace the day with any sense of purpose, let alone joy, so you might be fooled into considering this an apology for cowboy-sneezing on your Friday. But if you've read as far as "Friday," then seeing "The New York Jets" was insufficient deterrent. At that point, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

So, to the New York Jets: Thursday was a big day for them. They learned first that the boss is angry enough at his employees' opinions of their workplace that he is challenging their right to say anything about it at all. Later in the day, they lost comfortably to a team wearing the sort of all-gray uniform that belongs in a 1935 preseason game between Mudville and Boghouse Flats. The good news is that they, and therefore we, can take the weekend off.

There’s no wrong way to make a chocolate chip cookie. Let’s get that part out of the way so that we don’t get into a whole big fight about whose cuisine reigns supreme. You put a chocolate chip cookie in front of me, I’ll eat it and be happy. That’s a lock.

That said, I have been monkeying around with chocolate chip cookie recipes for as long as I’ve been a homemaker (nearly 20 years!). Many years ago, I stumbled upon a copycat recipe for Chick fil-A’s chocolate chunk cookies that received a glowing reception from all of the cookie monsters in my house. CFA makes a truly bitchin’ chocolate chipper, so knocking off their recipe as is satisfying for my belly as it is for my sense of justice.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.

Israel: This week certainly made it clear that the playoff committee is mostly operating off of vibes instead of any concrete, verifiable assessment of who the best teams are. But it doesn’t really matter that much, because no one can tell you which of these teams are actually good anyway. As soon as you think you have a handle on the landscape, a ranked team will just go and do something stupid like almost blowing it against Iowa or actually blowing it against Wake Forest. Why should anyone be expected to go off anything other than vibes?