giri nathan

more on Mboko - Eala later but I remain convinced that the best tennis match is between two future stars with highly dubious serves

msrachelforlittles.... what about msrachelforbigs? what if james wiseman is in my house and very cranky?

When the FBI arrested Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups, the basketball-watching public turned to sports media to help make sense of the story. What explanations were on offer? Before disclosing its own BetMGM partnership, The Athletic called “all of sports” complicit in the scandal. Bill Simmons dismissed the episode as ”a couple bad apples,” growing pains typical of a growth industry. Zach Lowe had ESPN's betting guy on his podcast; together they concluded that these issues can be tinkered out of existence by limiting prop bets and changing how teams report injuries. Lowe's podcast, like Simmons's, began with a FanDuel ad. The takeover of sports media by gambling companies imposes hard boundaries on the domain of these conversations. Most importantly, these captured discussions always obscure the social and political choices that enable the gambling industry to entrench itself. Allowing people to gamble on their phones and allowing sports gambling companies to spend untold sums on lobbying and advertising are choices. These choices, not some law of nature, are why millions of people have started gambling in recent years. Likewise, other sports media companies have chosen to offer up their audiences as prey to gambling outfits. Defector has chosen something else: We never have and never will take money from gambling companies. Subscribers fund our operations, which allows us to remain independent, critical, and uncompromised. Consider making that choice.

NBA media is not built to cover a gambling scandal, but Defector is: defector.com/products

I’ve been saying this! The writing’s so damn good that you don’t have to like tennis to love this book!

Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis

now that I’ve finished it, I can say @girinathan.bsky.social wrote one of the best sports books I’ve ever read, not because of access but because he is supernaturally talented at describing tennis, bodies, speech patterns, weather, rooms, vomiting, and other stuff bookshop.org/p/books/chan...

❤️ ❤️ ❤️

A Vibe Shift for Meddy - The Second Serve Daniil Medvedev is back on form with a win in Almaty.

Honestly @girinathan.bsky.social could blog about Medvedev every day and I would always read it

I needed a newsy excuse to share the Kash Patel image that popped into my head unbidden a few months ago

Interview: Giri Nathan This past summer, I hit up the US Open out in Queens for the first time in my life.

fun convo about my book with alphonse pierre, one of my favorite music critics

theleaks.substack.com/p/interview-...

kind of on edge watching wemby.. first jumpscare superstar

BOSTON:

I'll be doing a panel at the Book Festival this weekend, come by Saturday @ 2pm

thank you!!!

@girinathan.bsky.social Done. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Your “level” as a writer and observer is very, very high. To put it in that language, 9/10 or 10/10 on every page, plenty of 12/10s, and definitely no 2/10s. Congratulations!

they said sharia creep but it’s stevia creep

that is quite the overlap - so nice to meet you - hope you dig my book, and I suspect there’s an Escape Velocity in my very near future

The Defector D'Angelo Mixtape | Defector The music channel in Defector’s work Slack is, paradoxically or not, a fairly quiet place. People will talk about records they’re enjoying or not enjoying, Patrick will reply “type shit” to various st...

this was a lovely group jam defector.com/the-defector...

Waiting On D'Angelo | Defector “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” This is from Psalms 23:4, a classic prayer about God...

I wrote about D’Angelo

defector.com/waiting-on-d...

Charles Portis Can Make You Love A Loser | Defector I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one cr...

“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...

yeah it all still works in context, even if they're the only non-angelically lush sounds on the album

no podcaster ever to walk the earth is winning a 1v1 against "voodoo," it's nothing personal

Its a Duncd on post

wild how much my household and imagination were enlivened once i switched out the voice in my ears all day to d’angelo from—all due respect, day one subscriber—nate dunca n

The Blog Of The South | Defector Brandy: Giri, one of the first things you note in your lovely introductory essay yesterday about this book is Portis’s absolute control and precision. This was my third time reading it and I am always...

and here's our staff chat about the book defector.com/the-blog-of-...

screenshot of a subscription appeal we sent today: Who calls the shots where you get your news? Is it one of the richest men in the world? Is it the dull son of another one of the richest men in the world? Is it shareholders, for whom it's expedient to roll over in the face of nuisance lawsuits by the gangster state? Is it one of the private equity firms grinding media companies to dust to eke out returns? Is it someone who will fire a journalist for accurately describing Charlie Kirk’s beliefs? Is it a severely confused Brit? Is it the “rogue employee” who reprogrammed their company’s chatbot to urgently inform users about the “white genocide happening in South Africa”? Is it yet another corrosive tech platform? Is it a gambling company? Is it a league you, in theory, exist to critically report on? Is it some donkeys using AI to bring Horny Sports Blogging At Scale to a storied publication? Not if you read Defector. The 27 of us who work here own the company together. We have no outside investors, so we have no mandate to maximize shareholder value. We don’t take money from gambling companies. We aren’t out to fatten up and get acquired. Defector is uncompromised, a rarity in modern media. When we report, criticize, and analyze, it’s coming from us, not someone upstairs. We answer only to our subscribers. Become one!

excellent blogs today at defector. good time to subscribe! defector.com/products

another satisfied customer

Charles Portis Can Make You Love A Loser | Defector I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one cr...

whoops here’s the link defector.com/charles-port...

wrote about my first Charles Portis read. these lines will be bouncing around my head for years

also I’ve finally figured out where @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social learned his tricks

on the absurd cousin vs. cousin final at the Shanghai Masters

any recent/notable cases of this

I am in these nice books, writing about pain (grief) and pain (Thai food). Stories originally in @defector.com