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 Led Zeppelin, baseball grief, breaking into journalism, moving into college, and more.
Oh wow, it’s Election Day! Hooray for democracy, vote early and often, all of that shit. Election Day before sunset is always the slowest news day of the year, so let’s burn some clock off with your letters:
D:
I work in the IT department of a global financial institution. Like lots of other bigass banks, we've hopped on the AI bandwagon, which means there's a lot of pressure for me to adopt AI into my day-to-day work. I ran my year end review through it and I was stunned how good the results were. I've used it for summarizing and consolidating some new work, editing some emails and more. Somehow I've used it five times in a week to do real work. I'm starting to like it and think it's pretty good! Am I a bad person for boiling the ocean just to edit my work goals for a PowerPoint no one will really look at? This is the first technology in 30 years of working that really makes me feel conflicted about using it.
PS I didn't run this email through the bot.
Nah, I can’t damn you for using AI on the job, especially if your bosses are all horny for it. I have to accept that people will use this shit whether I like it or not. All I’ll say to you, D, is to limit your usage of AI as much as you can, for your own sake. Using AI on the job will only make it easier for your bosses to replace you with AI down the line. Also, studies are already showing that using ChatGPT and its siblings will make you, as an individual, dumber. And probably more depressed, too.
That’s true even if you only use AI for tedious bullshit. Doing menial tasks is a strangely useful life experience. I remember all of my office drone duties all too well. I remember the office copier breaking any time I dared to attempt an auto-collate. I remember logging numbers into competitive spending reports that were probably based on flawed data. I remember sitting through one awful PowerPoint deck after another. If I could have had a robot do all of that shit for me, I would’ve gladly made that robot my slave. But then … would I have felt more motivated to break out of that job? Would I have genuine office work experience to inform my personal writing? Would I even remember how to write a fucking email all by myself? Who would I be right now if I pulled an America and was just like “Eh, someone else can do it”? I’d probably be a useless button-masher, and I look at my phone too much already as is.
So I’m not gonna judge you for using AI. I’m just gonna worry for you.
Paul:
My 16 year-old has decided she's going to be a journalist (she's a good writer and just did a funny story on the death of awards shows). Is she doomed to grind out content for AI to gobble up?
I’m never gonna discourage any young person from wanting to become a journalist. The way to defeat bad journalism, AI-generated pap included, is with more people practicing good journalism.
That’s what I told my own 16-year-old son, who’d like to become a sports journalist himself. We toured a few colleges last month. On those long walks across varying campuses, I had enough time—and he was receptive enough—to really get into the nuts and bolts of choosing this life path. So Paul, copy and paste this for your own kid if you’d like.
First of all, I told my son: Don’t pick a college based strictly on whether or not it has a journalism school. For one thing, there’s no guarantee that a school will teach you good journalistic habits. That’s especially true now that Trumpists have both dismantled and infiltrated higher education, and now that traditional journalistic outlets like The New York Times have methods that have proven dated at best, and actively corrupt at worst. I don’t know if some asshole Medill professor is gonna teach my son to “never editorialize,” or some other weak-ass shit like that.
More important, you don’t need to study journalism to become a journalist. I didn’t. I was just another English major in college. But I used a great deal of those teachings while learning to become a journalist, essentially on the fly, at Deadspin and at GQ. That’s the value of a college education. No matter what area you concentrate in, you can always use what you’ve learned in your future work.
That’s especially true for journalism. If you want to be a political journalist (bad idea), you can major in a fuckload of subjects that can apply to that field: History, Political Science, Sociology, Economics, Sexting With A Kennedy, and such and such. Everything you learn, in college and beyond, is useful to your work, even if that line of work doesn’t superficially match up with your area of expertise. In fact, coming from a different background can let you tackle certain subjects with a viewpoint that others won’t have.
That brings me to the next big thing I told my son, which was to focus exclusively on the quality of your work. You can’t control the state of any industry, let alone the entire world. All of that shit will do whatever it does. You also can’t worry about competition, in academics or in the workforce, otherwise you’ll just drive yourself nuts. But as an individual, you CAN control whether or not the work you do is up to your learned standards. If you keep high standards, and do work that meets those standards, you’ll build your professional confidence, enough to make you hirable.
That ain’t a lock, of course; I know plenty of great journalists who have essentially been forced out of the game. But they knew what the fuck they were doing, and that’ll serve them well in future jobs and, more important, for life in general. Just be someone who knows what they’re doing, and let it play out from there. Because I’m sure that you can make more money as a prospective journalist by selling out and joining a Barstool-funded AI farm … but that’s not a definition of “success” that I subscribe to. The more of us that are driven to become smart, capable, and ethical, the more holistically successful we’ll all be.
Oh, and start blogging right now. I told my son to do that, too. Not at Defector, though; we have a nepotism policy, after all.
Dr. Cox:
Seemingly every credit card now gives you exclusive access to over 1,000 airport lounges, and I can't imagine they're worth it. Every airport has a bar you can get sloshed at before your flight, right? Do these lounges offer massages? Are they just some bullshit tossed to the rabble to make them feel more important than the lesser scum who have to wait by the gate the whole time?
Every airport has a bar, yes. But those bars aren’t free. Airport lounges, on the other hand, usually offer unlimited free beer and wine, plus maybe some shitty well liquor. Those lounges also have cushy seating, private workspaces, free snacks, easy charging access, and, perhaps most vital, a concierge at the front desk who can handle any ticketing issues that you have. So if you ever walked into one such lounge, you wouldn’t be like, Pfft, why should I stay here when I can head to the gate area and sit between a screaming child and a man talking on speaker phone? You’d stay. You’d luxuriate. Oh, and you might even get that massage. As Chris Rock explained to New York magazine a few years ago:
If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets. If the average person could see the Virgin Airlines first-class lounge, they’d go, What? What? This is food, and it’s free, and they … what? Massage? Are you kidding me?
The good news (string attached) is that you can easily use whatever miles you’ve accumulated to splurge for lounge access on your next flight out of town. Because while these lounges function to separate the fancypantses from the peasantry milling about the terminal, they also save both airline and credit card companies alike money in providing an easy way for travelers to fritter away their miles. I used to think of miles primarily as a vehicle for frequent travelers to get free trips down the line. But airlines don’t want you using miles for THAT, hence blackout dates and all of those other fun conditionals.
So now they let you use miles on basically everything else, including minor seat upgrades (I did this over the weekend), in-flight WiFi (did that, too), and one-time access to the hallowed airport lounge (skipped it). They’ll also let you use your miles/bonus cash on hundreds of small, non-travel perks at various retailers. That helps reduce the number of people using their miles for a free ride to Tokyo. In my head, there’s always been a future where I have enough miles logged to get a free upgrade to a first class sleep pod on every trip. In reality, I’m lucky to get an $8 discount on some fucking Gogo.
Because my dad worked in the airlines, I got to bum around a shitload of airport lounges when I was a kid. I’d load up on free Coke and peanuts, spread out on the open furniture, and then board our plane and have to pee 56 times. It was a fun way to grow up. But now that I’m an adult, and now the airline industry has devolved into a purer form of racketeering, I’ve seen the inside of an airport lounge just once this century. And that was only because a Defector reader recognized me at Heathrow a couple of years ago and invited me as his plus-one to the Delta lounge while I sat out a lengthy flight delay. That afternoon took me back to headier, perkier days. Again, I drank too much Coke. I wish I could visit one every time I travel, but I have to ration my miles like they’re precious gemstones. Perks ain’t what they used to be.
So airport lounges are very much worth it, although a free flight is still worth far more.
Drew (not me):
Why do college sports have professional coaches? Shouldn’t the team staff be made up of students/grad students who are training to become professional coaches, with the older coaches acting as “professors” and supervisors, like everything else at a university?
Yeah, but all of my teachers in college were professionals. I know that at larger schools, the main professor gives the big lecture and then the face-to-face work is done with a grad assistant. But in my opinion, that setup blows. I’d rather get an econ professor who’s an actual economist*, especially given the tuition rates involved.
(*Word at Colby was that all of the econ professors had Fuck You money, because they’d all written textbooks that had become mandatory purchases at every other college.)
Now I say all that while also knowing that we’re comparing apples to Orange Bowls here (thank you). Colleges don’t bring in football recruits to broaden their horizons. They bring them in to win football games. And Indiana isn’t climbing up to No. 2 in the rankings by having a ragtag bunch of master's degree candidates coaching that team. Those players wouldn’t even learn to become better football players if that were the case. They have to learn from real coaches. In the NIL era, their livelihoods now depend on it.
HALFTIME!
Jonah:
PPR is BULLSHIT!
I used to feel the same way. For the people out there who don’t play fantasy football, “PPR” stands for points per reception. That means that a wideout who catches 14 balls for zero yards (Deebo Samuel) will accrue just as many points as some guy who catches three passes for 110. The latter performance is far more valuable in a real game than the former, so fantasy stats should reflect that. Again, I used to feel this way, probably because I cared about fantasy football too much.
But then daily fantasy came along. DFS uses PPR by default, which means that you have to accept the impurities that deal entails. I surrendered years ago. I don’t have time to get all mad about fantasy bad beats. More important, PPR means higher scoring, and I love me some higher scoring. So what if my player never found the end zone Sunday? My team still managed to rack up 130 points anyway! I love big numbers, and who the fuck wants to play a fantasy game that ends 70-60? This isn’t the 1990s.
Brian:
How does this YouTube TV versus ESPN thing play out? These carriage disputes are usually small potatoes, but we’re talking about ESPN. ESPN! Not being on YouTube TV! That seems absolutely insane in 2025, no?
The buildup to this Google/Disney tiff barely fazed me. This is because I’ve lived through so many other carriage disputes, the particulars of which are almost always the same: one big company gets into a staredown with another big company, your local network runs a giant banner about it like there’s a fucking hurricane about to bear down on your city, and then the two sides magically come to terms either right before or right after the deadline. Lather, rinse, repeat. So I’m mildly annoyed that ESPN has gone temporarily dark on my beloved YouTube TV for the time being, but not enough that I’m gonna call my Congressman to demand more Cowboys-Cardinals in my life.
On a related note, I have now reached the point where I’m grateful to see an ad, any ad, for a normal product on my TV screen. That’s especially true this time of year, when every commercial pod is just one miserable campaign ad after another. I saw one attack ad the other day that ended with, Bob Democrat is SO WOKE, IT’S A JOKE. Shit like this takes days off my lifespan. Worst of all, they’re political ads for races in VIRGINIA. I don’t live in Virginia, and I make a point of avoiding that state whenever possible. Chain a cinder block to Virginia and throw it off a bridge. Whatever you do, leave my Maryland ass out of your ad buy.
Every other ad during the game is either for a new prescription drug, or a mysterious PSA from some evil organization named Citizens For Free Debanking or whatever the fuck. So when I get an ad that’s just for, like, Coors Light now, I hug my television in gratitude. Just sell me widgets and then leave me the fuck alone. Every company is in this dogshit nation is a lobbying firm now.
Varun:
I need some perspective. I am a huge Blue Jays fan and took this loss extremely hard, I have legitimately lost about a day’s worth of sleep over the last series; even on days they won because of anxiety of the next game. And judging by social media, I’m not completely alone. But how does this make sense? I’m 44 years old, and this is on par with when Kamala or Hilary lost for me. But this is just a sports team. Was this team and all their nail-biting games really that endearing, or is it about how my psychological resilience has been worn down by the state of the world?
No no no, that’s just baseball. If you’re watching a sporting contest that makes you think, “This is on par with some of the darkest moments in world history that I myself have witnessed,” that means you are watching baseball. And good baseball! If the baseball isn’t costing you sleep, or it’s not making you spontaneously break out in hives, that means that you’re a Pirates fan, which I assure you is a fate that no Torontonian wants for themselves. You’re much better off cheering for a team that makes the World Series and then loses that World Series in the most agonizing way possible. That’s how you know the baseball is working.
I’m not even kidding around. The reason to become a sports fan is specifically to have something to overreact to. It’s no fun if the only thing that’s life-or-death to you is matters of life and death. You need some pretend drama in there. You need something that allows you to scream FUCK YOU I’LL KILL YOU at your television and have that be perfectly acceptable.
Because sports is, above all else, theater. Like theater, you watch sports to feel something. It’s all pretend, if you want to be a snob about it, but the feelings are both real and indelible. If you didn’t feel a goddamn thing while watching sports, that World Series especially, then the games would serve no purpose. Also, you’d be a boring asshole. Better to open yourself up to having your heart broken, to love something even when you know you can lose it. That’s part of the human experience.
Varun, you probably don’t feel any better after reading any of that. You still probably want to jump into a hole. Sorry about that.
Sue:
In the latest Funbag, you mentioned how much you'll enjoy Halloween again when you have grandkids. How upset would you be if none of your kids wound up reproducing? I've always felt guilty that I never wanted kids because my mom and dad would have loved being grandparents. Not guilty enough to have children just to please my mom and dad, though.
Sure, I’d feel a little disappointed if my kids had no kids of their own, especially if they WANTED kids but were unable to. But I’ll never lord that disappointment over them. My kids’ lives are their own. So if they’re ever like, “Dad, the three of us agreed that we’re never having children, because the Magary bloodline must end,” I’ll be like, “OK, that’s cool.” They’ll TOTALLY know I’m bummed, because I’ll have hangdog eyes and will have taken up drinking again. But they won’t get some endless passive-aggressive spiel from me about it every Thanksgiving. My days of helicopter parenting ended the second these kids grew old enough to not stick their tongues into the wall socket. It was the right move to stop hovering over them, and it’ll remain a good move until I’m gone.
Besides, I can always just get another dog.
Ben:
My brother and I went to college in the late 1980's and there was SO much stuff that students took with them: clothes, LPs in milk crates, CDs, a bicycle, pillows, a portable TV, a computer and printer, a mini fridge. The car was PACKED. You have a kid in college, what were they packing?
Clothes. So many goddamn clothes. When my kid packed for school, she filled up maybe a dozen Ikea storage bags with 5,800 pounds of thrift-store finds. Looked like a bank heist in the back of our van. She also packed art supplies, wall posters, shoes, sheets, towels, snacks, and some basic dorm room appliances like a microwave. But those bags are what I remember above all else, because the girl didn’t pack any of the '90s dorm fare that I stuffed into the back of my own car. My college move was a move. I was packing clothes, stereo equipment, footballs, wall tapestries, a lava lamp, a mini fridge a small couch, a TV, my N64, and enough beer to kill Lemmy all over again. I’m surprised the chassis of my car didn’t drag along the asphalt all the way up 95.
The internet has obviated the need for a lot of bigger items in any college move. No need for my girl to bring an SDTV when she just watches everything on a laptop instead. But you know how much Americans love their stuff, so you better believe that modern teenagers like my daughter will still find a way to occupy all of that extra room. She made us bring plants in the car. How the fuck am I gonna stick a houseplant on top of all this shit? How is it gonna stay upright? Can’t we just hit a Lowe’s once we’re up there?
The bittersweet end to this story is that our kid isn’t coming back home this time around. She and her friends found a house near campus and they’re all moving in at the beginning of summer. So the big college moves with her are probably, sadly, over. Will she still force us to pack the van with the entire nursery the next time we drive up? You bet your ass she will.
Pete:
I was making copies today, when one of the English teachers walked by with a copy of Moby Dick. She picked up her copies, and I asked what her white whale was. “Teaching this book,” she answered. What’s your white whale, Ahab?
This fucking president. That’s my white whale, and yours too. And I’m gettin’ real, real sick of trying to chase him down.
Justin:
Why couldn't they just have an NFL "week" be 10-11 days or something? They could also then schedule one or two games almost every night, a larger cluster on traditional weekend dates. Massage the schedule so the same teams don't always play on the same days. Sometimes a team plays five days apart, sometimes it's nine or 10. The season could go on for like eight months. Players get, on the whole, more time to recuperate between games. More players who suffer a considerable injury can make it back in season.
I get the idea, but no. That’s not workable. There’s a reason that the NFLPA has historically fought for more time off for players. These guys need the entire offseason to recover from the 17-game schedule. Ask them; all of them feel like shit from September to January, and spacing out the games a little doesn’t make the soreness go away. Also, those same players don’t like having the game schedule staggered all over the place: Thursday Night Football, games in London, all that shit. Pro athletes are creatures of habit, and their bodies are fine-tuned for a consistent routine of games every seven days. Also, most athletes don’t like being idle. They wanna get out there, so asking them to participate in an eight-month season where they’re playing every so often is like asking me not to eat the whole snack bag of Doritos. An impossibility.
Of course, your proposal is being made strictly from a TV viewing standpoint. You and I know that’s all the NFL cares about, and you and I also know that the player’s union is currently a fucking mess. So if the owners want to make the NFL more year round for TV money’s sake, they’ll do it. But players would hate it, and you know what? I think I would, too. By the time the Super Bowl has come and gone, I’m ready for a break from football. Every sport needs its dormant period.
Email of the week!
Brian:
I recently learned that as a teenager, my father-in-law saw Led Zeppelin live at their fifth-ever concert in North America, a show at Gonzaga University in December 1968, two weeks before they even released Led Zeppelin I. They opened for Vanilla Fudge and were incorrectly billed as "Len Zefflin" because the ad copywriter at the local newspaper misheard their name. Even better, this show is widely considered the first Zeppelin concert ever recorded on tape, because a student in the crowd recorded it.
I've known my FIL for 15 years, hang out with him probably once a month and we get along well, but I am just now hearing this story. I am completely blown away. If I had a story this cool to tell, it'd be the first thing I told every person I ever met until the end of time. Curious if you've ever been similarly surprised by a great story that was slow-rolled to you by someone you know well?
Oh, Dave McKenna keeps 500 stories like that in his holster. We never know when he’ll spring one of them on us.
