Did you just hear that loud noise? That was me banging the gavel on Bills Week. I'll do it again: Bang! Bills Week is now over.

Thanks for joining us during this year's theme week, and for your continued support of Defector. Catch up on any Bills Week posts you might have missed right here. And be sure to check out the exciting announcements we made this week, if you haven't already. Onward.

Liam Gallagher won out over Liam MacCarthy. And so the All-Ireland hurling final, traditionally a fall classic, will be played this weekend at Croke Park in Dublin, as the hallowed Dublin stadium gears up for Oasis reunion shows. 

But seasonal shift or no, Cork vs. Tipperary promises to be a supernova of a tilt, and the toughest ticket in town, notwithstanding the upcoming concerts from the reunited Manchester band, led by Liam and Noel Gallagher. This is a mashup of historic hurling powerhouses.

After a month of controversy, Lloyd Howell Jr. resigned from his post as the NFL Players Association executive director on Thursday night, effective immediately. “It’s clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day,” Howell wrote in a statement announcing his decision. “I hope this will allow the NFLPA to maintain its focus on its player members ahead of the upcoming season.”

What I knew of the eccentric baseball owner Bill Veeck, I knew only from stray web searches at White Sox games. What was a shower stall doing on the concourse? What are those pinwheel things above the scoreboard? While the trainer came out to check on Yoan Moncada or the pitching coach asked Michael Kopech to throw strikes, the answers to these questions were easy to find, read, and forget. Usually the research never went much further; my curiosity is no match for bad ballpark WiFi and dwindling phone battery. And usually, Michael Kopech continued to not throw strikes.

Last summer, Veeck popped up on my phone again for a different reason. On a slow news day in Chicago, he was the subject of a heated sports talk radio rant: The just-hired White Sox play-by-play guy had mispronounced his name.

You may have once again noticed that a lot of people on TV, the internet, and in your real life are talking about files. The Epstein files. They want them released! They want Donald Trump in jail! They want to know what the hell is going on! Seriously, though, what the hell is going on?

As Defector's chief file-explainer, I am here to once again tell you all you need to know about the latest files.

There was a moment, near the end of my week-plus in Maine, when I could actually feel myself Becoming Normal again. The combination of relatively healthy activities, reduced screen-time, and a spike in omega-3 fatty acids due to increased seafood intake chipped some of the barnacles off my brain; detaching from the news cycle to some extent did the rest. I mention this not just to tell you how my vacation went, but because it was in listening to this episode that I realized how fleeting that moment truly was. We're back.

There are only two pieces of media that have made me wistful for a small-town/suburban childhood I didn't have: A Christmas Story, and Calvin And Hobbes. Before you accuse me of specifically longing for the tract housing of Ohio, if I interrogate this a little further it turns out that what I really wanted was a yard. Because I wanted to shoot a BB gun at imaginary bandits like Ralphie did, and, like Calvin, I wanted to build demented snowmen.

Bill Watterson knew, or at least captured better than anyone, the private derangement of the average 6-year-old boy. Imagination is one thing: Monsters lived under the bed, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, teachers were misshapen alien monsters in disguise, Tracer Bullet charges $50 per day plus expenses. But somewhere beyond those fairly standard fantasy worlds lies the grisly id of the artist, and the snow is his canvas.

In 2019, Victor Ortega Jiménez was visiting the Atlanta zoo with his family when he became mesmerized by a flock of Chilean flamingos. The flamingos were feeding, their long necks squiggled into the water and flat feet stomping in a kind of dance. Ortega Jiménez noticed the flamingo heads produced capillary waves, concentric ripples on the water's surface. "What is happening inside of the water?" he wondered.

This post was originally published on the author's Substack on June 24. It has been republished here in conjunction with Bills Week.

Everybody knows about the MAGA hat. It’s red. It says what it says on it. The content of the MAGA hat is obvious. It’s a team hat, a cult uniform, a panting, sniveling dare for you to say something about it. It is, for better or worse, iconic at this point, the single image or object that exemplifies this movement, the illustration that will appear in future history books so long as Elon Musk hasn’t had Grok “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge” by then. But its iconicity is not just limited to its color and its catchphrase. The FORM of this hat matters, in part because it’s such a telling one.

The Buffalo Bills of my childhood are not the Buffalo Bills I live with now. They are certainly not the Buffalo Bills I’ve written about before on this website.

It’s weird to think about in retrospect. The Bills went from clockwork ineptitude to clockwork competence with only a handful of transition years in the middle, from the team I finally saw suit up for a playoff game when I was 19 years old to the team that has won five division titles in a row. From the basement to the top of the league.

Keen observers of the independent media space might be aware that we at Defector have done some informal consulting over the years to help other emerging worker-owned publications find their footing. Without overstating our contributions to their efforts—generally we’re providing just an hour or two on the phone, and a couple email responses—we always find […]