At approximately 11 p.m. on Dec. 13, 2025, I thought I’d lost it all. I found myself at the Williamsburg location of Barcade—a combination bar and vintage arcade—for my J-school’s end-of-semester party. No particular part of me wanted to spend the night in Williamsburg or at an arcade, let alone both at once. But I needed to make more friends at school. Recently, after a professor offered me some…
Sometimes it is about survival. Only if you survive now can you thrive later.
So quitting is not meant to be taken on the ego.
I wanted to spend the week before I started at Defector relaxing, reclined and pensive while reading books and watching movies that would inspire brilliant blogs I could pitch to Lauren and Brandy. I was in Southern California, where I grew up, visiting my parents before going to a wedding. Relaxation is not what came…
When I was 24, a stranger on the internet called me a white man, and it sent me into such a tailspin that I changed my byline. Before then, I was going by “Alex Laughlin,” just my first and last name. I had started writing about race, and I’d made a podcast about multiracial identity called _Other_ , but if my name was to represent me on its own, there was no way for a stranger to know that very…
As a rule, a college graduation is a miserable affair. If you’re an outgoing senior, you have wait around for hours on end in the sweltering heat, all while hungover and wearing a full-length black gown. If you’re a parent, you have to sit in a folding chair in the middle of a lawn for the same amount of time, seething about how you had to park your car so far away from everything. Everyone in…
For the first time in six years, I have closets.
At the Brooklyn apartment I just moved out of, all available evidence points to them just screwing up the blueprint. My bedroom was twice the height of a normal bedroom, and there's no reason why they shouldn't have extended the other bedroom, a flight of stairs up, over my room. There was a secret, unfinished space above the kitchen, accessible…
Obviously, going to print with piddly retail squabbles is the stuff of hacks. But I'm hacky enough, and still stunned enough by the upselling tactics, that I just gotta share.
I’ve previously noted that some power people here at Defector have occasionally suggested I try to write regularly about food, because they think I’m a weirdo about eating, and most mundane things. I’ve always begged off,…
Fourteen years. My wife and I were proud minivan owners for 14 years until this month. Once you have three children, practicality takes immediate priority over self-image, so I was never fundamentally against owning a minivan. I was never like, “Oh my God, they’ll take away my man card now!” I was too busy changing diapers and cleaning up barf for that kind of shit to matter. As my old friend and…
My son is a junior. Junior year is the Oh Shit year of high school _,_ as in,_Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take the SAT. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take it again if I score anywhere below 1580. Oh shit, AP Calc is kicking my ass right now._ There are plenty more _oh shits_ where that came from, and they all center around that eternal source of angst for many juniors and their parents: college. The…
What are peptides? Honestly, I don't even think about supplements of any sort because I don't use them or believe in them.
The post Silverback Tarzan’s No-BS Guide to Looksmaxxing appeared first on Interview Magazine.
Before bonesmashing and meth, men ate steak and eggs to get jacked. Matt Lewis—known online as Silverback Tarzan—is a 53-year-old hunk who’s built a 400K following by looksmaxxing naturally.
The post Silverback Tarzan’s No-BS Guide to Looksmaxxing appeared first on Interview Magazine.
Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job, there are like a hundred thousand would-be writers, if not far more than that. Plenty of world-historically excellent writers have gone their whole adult lives without…
This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now.
Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:
It’s two days before Christmas, and my family and I are in Munich. We got here on a red-eye the morning prior, and remain barely functional thanks to jet lag. But we didn’t fly all this way just to sleep, no matter how badly all of us want to do so. And if there’s any city that demands you keep your eyes wide open, it’s Munich in all of its Christmastime splendor.
We arrive at the Marienplatz,…
I’m currently reading _The Power Broker_. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish _The Power Broker_ , and then you will regard me as one of the world’s elite readers, as you should.
There’s just one problem. I’m also reading _Paper_ , by Mark Kurlansky.…
Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no fresh allegations of cheating curlers or references to serially violated hog lines; that mad Norwegian bastard who has…