Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a recurring series about books and reading them.
The beautiful shiny phone is killing us. We all know it, but there it is. We want it. It is made to keep us captivated. We are moths to its flame. Often, when I am around people I love, and one of us is looking at our phone, the other will say "What's happening on your phone?" This is embarrassing. It is so rare that anything is happening on the phone. About 99 percent of the time, the other person says "nothing," and puts their phone down. I see this in people in every generation. No one is immune.
People keep throwing dildos onto the court at WNBA games, which is an incredibly wack trend even before you hear who is taking credit for it: Crypto bros.
On Wednesday, a powerful loser and crypto enthusiast who calls himself Lt. Daldo Raine—you may have just instinctively reached for a blunt object—spoke to ESPN's Katie Barnes and claimed that he and his fellow crypto shitheads have been orchestrating recent dildo tosses at WNBA games for the sake of pumping their meme coin. "We wanted to really make memes funny again," he told Barnes. Mission not accomplished, my friend.
There are only so many ways to describe a podcast, as regular readers of these little blogs already know. Because they are cut in two by our ad break, it is easy enough to mentally divide them; because they all begin with Drew's signature skronking vocal overture, they all have a shape. But what does it mean, really, to say that something like half of a podcast is given over to soda-related discourse, and that the other component parts are about going to a Marlins game, the demi-crisis in WNBA officiating, and also a frank discussion about the frustration of duffing the preparation of a familiar recipe. You can put all that together and reach 100 percent of a podcast and 63 minutes, but also those things do not, on their face, fit together at all. I realize that. And yet:
Josh Naylor is slow. Not slow in the way that catchers are considered slow by default, or how some tall lanky guys seemingly can't get their legs moving, or even slow in the way that Kyle Schwarber is. Josh Naylor is third-percentile sprint speed slow. Josh Naylor is the 16t...
Tom Brady may be incredibly famous, obscenely successful, and (formerly?) outrageously handsome, but he has never been cool. This is a plain fact, one that Patriots fans like myself overlooked during his tenure there and one that Patriots haters loved to mock him for. Since ...
Some people are fans of the Dolphins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dolphins. This 2024 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
LAS VEGAS — From July 3-13, World Table Tennis staged a Grand Smash tournament in Las Vegas for the first time. Like the Grand Slams of tennis, the Grand Smashes sit atop WTT’s tournament hierarchy, and with $1.55 million in prizes and main draws of 64 top players, the Smash...
How do you respond to a guy who's proven that he can crush your 103.9-mph fastball deep into left field for a four-bagger? Well, you don't throw him your 103.9-mph fastball; you dissolve him with your slider. That's how Mason Miller was able to begin his ninth-inning save on Wednesday night.
The Padres' big deadline add from not-Oakland was in the news for the wrong reason after Tuesday's game, when Diamondbacks DH Lourdes Gurriel Jr. tied the score in the eighth by making Miller's flameball the fastest pitch ever homered on (probably ever, but at least since they started keeping track of those things in 2008). San Diego recovered to win in extra innings, but it was hard to forget the fact that Miller's searing heat had been made to look so vincible.
Anyone who ever met Wavy Dave and lived to tell the tale—which is, in point of fact, everyone who has ever met Wavy Dave—would tell you about his claw. It was big, that's for certain, but this was not unusual for male fiddler crabs, which wield one enormous front claw, much ...
It is perhaps unfair to the rest of humanity to slot Alan Dershowitz in as a specific type of guy. He fits into a number of variously rancid cohorts—Inner Circle Jeffrey Epstein Associates; Celebrity Attorneys (Derogatory); People With "Harvard" As Their Personality; People ...
Oh yeah, Cameron Brink! The Los Angeles Sparks’ No. 2 pick in 2024 last played in the WNBA over a year ago, when she tore her ACL in the first quarter of a game against the Sun. There's not really a convenient time for a torn ACL, but the timing of this one was rough: The in...
Some people are fans of the Dallas Cowboys. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dallas Cowboys. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
There are more intricate ways to measure a pitcher's talent and effectiveness than the digits on a radar gun, but none quite so visceral. The Padres acquired Mason Miller from the California Athletics because of the fact that he strikes out an absurd number of hitters on his...
As summer marches on sweatily, and languid thoughts turn to relief, I am put in mind of the solution to all of our temperature-related troubles: the waterslide that kills you. Please send me down this slide immediately.
I am of course speaking of the Fly Over slide at the Duinrell amusement park in the Netherlands, the first and logically only waterslide that was entirely filled with water, forcing riders to hold their breath for the duration of the ride. Unlike boring, standard, "safe" waterslides, the water was not merely a lubricant to help riders go faster have "fun," but filled the tube to the brim and completely submerged anyone brave enough to ride it, and generated tangible anxiety in anyone who even heard about it.
Harrison Butker, an NFL placekicker best known for his wide-right worldview, hoped to parlay clutch kicks into political clout. His plan is not working out.
A report released yesterday by the investigative team at Open Secrets shows Butker’s fledgling political action committee, known as Upright, is having trouble getting any lift. The PAC’s recent filing with the Federal Election Commission oozed lots of malaise and showed little money. Through the end of June 2025, Butker’s PAC had taken in only $4,023 in contributions this year and had just $1,786.43 left in its coffers. And, according to Open Secrets, of the $7,400 Upright has spent, “none of it benefitted Republican political candidates, either through direct donations to candidate committees or via advertisements that boost Republicans or criticize Democrats.”
ESPN's position on the NFL is not unlike that of every other network with a significant sports presence, which is to say it scrubs where Roger Goodell says there's a stain. The football thing is the only provably and relentlessly bankable thing in the entire play-for-play di...
An estate sale gives you a chance to look inside a person’s life. Did they own nice silverware? Were they a hoarder of worthless little tchotchkes? Did they have a creepy doll collection? A normal and not that creepy doll collection? At the higher end, this can offer a windo...
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 loaded fries, USC football sucking shit, toothpaste, Lamar Jackson, and more.
Hey now, let’s all give a big round of applesauce to Albert Burneko for presiding over this column a week ago. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Albert is our greatest living American, now and forever.
I was scrolling the Steam store aimlessly a few Saturdays past, avoiding my various anxieties and responsibilities as a professional, when I happened upon a game whose banner appeared to be the old guy from Darkest Dungeon digging a hole (I wasn't looking very closely). Enti...
It's all that baseball fans can talk about this morning, the huge memorable swing of the bat at the narrative and emotional climax of Monday night's dramatic game in Arlington, Texas. An incredible, historic moment!
Allow me to set the scene: It's the bottom of the 10th inn...
Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
At this point it's clear that the Caitlin Clark conversation, for lack of a better term, isn't going anywhere. Some things just become so ubiquitous and so useful as a culture-war cudgel that they can never be put down. You have to accept the fact that everyone is eventually...
In November 2020, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague. What great work will emerge from this pandemic?” It was a stupid question at the time, and five years on, a cursory survey of the cinematic output that deals in ...
Ferrari had a great weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix, so long as you ignore the bad parts. After an upgrade package, the team has been on the rise. They are currently second in the Constructors' Championship, and that's factoring in their double disqualification in China ...
It is a measure of the history of the Florida/Miami Marlins that Sunday feels like the third-biggest day in franchise history. It wasn't, but this is what happens when your franchise has two World Series victories and seven other playoff games in 33 years. That third spot on...
If conventional wisdom holds that international tournament finals are often boring and conservatively played, the Copa América Femenina final between Brazil and Colombia was a glorious exception. Eight goals, an under-punished headbutt, four total comebacks, a returning legend contributing yet another legendary feat, a tense if not stellar penalty shootout ... Saturday's match in Quito, Ecuador had just about everything. The only thing it lacked was an upset, as the favored Brazil fought back time and time again to win the shootout, lifting its fifth straight Copa trophy.
Jhoan Durán was one of the prizes of a busy trade deadline, moving from the suddenly tanking Twins to a Phillies team in a dogfight with the very best of the National League. Durán is not just an electric arm, but a very marketable one, as well. Along with his 2.01 ERA in 49...
Miguel Cairo, interim manager for the woebegone Washington Nationals, recently referred to the Milwaukee Brewers as a "pain-in-the-butt team." He'd just watched the Brewers rough up Washington's helpless pitchers in the first game of a weekend series, and struggled to put hi...
Your long wait for the Monday crossword has come to an end. This week's puzzle was constructed by Mat Holmes and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Mat lives in Maine and is a Portland Hearts of Pine fan. Mat is psyched to be back in Defector and you can look for his puzzles coming soon at AVCX, Universal, Spyscape, and the Los Angeles Times.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
