These were the worst purchases by the Defector staff in 2024.
Two Subscriptions To Paramount Plus
I hate Paramount Plus. We've been over this. It's a garbage app with garbage design. After I published my blog complaining about it, several people who had some professional relationship to Paramount Plus reached out to agree with me. Everyone hates it! It's slow and it doesn't work. So many shows I want to watch are on there, and I'm forced to interact with it all the time. All the ads on there are for Tracker, which I still haven't seen. So IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when I got an alert from Rocket Money that I was paying for two Paramount Plus subscriptions! Apparently at some point, my partner had gotten one as well, so we were both giving monthly money to this terrible fucking service that we both hate! To make it even worse, we had these for years! For years, we have been paying for this awful app twice! I hate you so much, Paramount Plus! - Kelsey McKinney
Bad Stadium Drinks
If you attend 50-plus live sporting events in a year, as I did, you’re bound to have some low moments, libation-wise. Two stadium drinks come to mind. The first was a hot chocolate I bought at the Big House during Michigan’s spring game, a gathering of the football team’s stupidest and sickest fans. On this afternoon, I was one of Michigan football’s coldest fans as well, having neglected to wear a coat. A piping cup o’ hot chocolate sounded great. I ordered one and paid, and the concessions worker handed me the cup. Hmm. Was I being pranked? This was very obviously not a piping cup o’ hot choc! Then I understood: I’d paid for a cup of powder and would need to fill the cup with hot water at the sad little hot water stand across the concourse and mix my hot chocolate myself. But the water at the sad little hot water stand was no longer hot. I was several dollars poorer and zero degrees warmer. At least TJ Guy looked good out there.
A few months later, I begged Tom Ley to let me knock off work in the middle of the day to go see a Tarik Skubal start that had been moved up from the evening on short notice. In my haste to get to the ballpark, I’d left my ID at home, but I was hankering for something to drink. A nice cold can o’ seltzer sounded great. Thinking Celsius was a brand of seltzer and not bothering to look at the can, I purchased a watermelon Celsius. One sip taught me to always read labels. Ironically, I found the whole experience pretty draining. At least the Tigers won. - Maitreyi Anantharaman
A $157 Steak, Plus A $4 Dipping Sauce
I'm not a stupid guy, OK? I know that when an item on a menu has "market price," next to it, that item is going to be pretty expensive. And yet, it has been several months since this happened, and I still feel bamboozled. Led astray. Hoodwinked!
My wife and I were on vacation in Seattle, and decided to go out for a fancy dinner. Perhaps the alarm bells should have started ringing when noticed a $50 cocktail on the menu, but everything else was priced reasonably enough. I think the most expensive entree available was around $40. Then, there it was: Dry-Aged Steak: market price. (Add dipping sauce: $4). I usually use the other prices on the menu as context clues to what "market price" might truly mean. There's no way that anything market price is more than double the cost of the most expensive thing on the menu, right?
It didn't help that as soon as we sat down, the waiter informed us that there was only one dry-aged steak left in the whole building, and that if we wanted it, we should order fast. She also made sure to mention that the dipping sauce was really good. We picked a few normally priced items to share, conferred briefly, and decided that we should get the dry-aged steak. We were on vacation! And you know what, we said to each other, not so much with our words but through the telltale signs of vacation intoxication that were swirling our eyes, let's go ahead and get that special $4 dipping sauce, too.
The food arrived. Everything was delicious. The steak was ... fine. It was kind of a normal steak? The dipping sauce was essentially a three-ounce cup of sriracha. We had a good time trying to game out what exactly we thought "dry-aged" meant.
The bill came. My heart sank as soon as I read it. I tried to conceal the look of panic that ran across my face, but my wife clocked it. A lump was forming in my stomach as she asked me what was wrong, and I couldn't bear to tell her. I just slid the receipt over to her, as if I was handing over a note that said Your whole family is dead.
We were both embarrassed. We managed to pay the bill and get the fuck out of there, somehow much more sober than we were when we sat down. - Tom Ley
A Bottle Of Fernet-Branca
It’s a Defector tradition, when we all get together, to take a round of shots of fernet. It’s an inherited tradition from the Deadspin days, having been introduced by Tommy Craggs because he’s a Bay Area guy but mostly because he enjoys making other people miserable. Fernet, for the uninitiated, is an amaro that tastes like you’re drinking a fir tree, but with notes of toothpaste. It’s bad, and in sharing its badness lives camaraderie, thus making it the perfect group shot.
I got out over my skis. After a decade-plus of “enjoying” fernet shots, I managed to half-convince myself that it was an acquired taste and that I had acquired it. I made an impulse buy at the liquor store of an entire bottle, just for Barry. When did I imagine I would drink this? Did I think I would be making celebratory toasts alone in my home? Did I think it could sub for mouthwash in a pinch? In an outcome that will surprise nobody, months and months later the 750 ml bottle of fernet still contains about 700 ml of fernet, and sits in the back of my fridge, lonely and untouched. I severely overestimated my desire to drink a prank digestif for pleasure. Is it even still potable at this point? Was it ever? Maybe I should give out shots to the teens next Halloween, and make them realize nothing about drinking is cool. - Barry Petchesky
Baby Clothes
I love my son. I love dressing him up. I spent my wife’s pregnancy buying him cool clothes and sneakers. I can recommend the Ross Dress for Less off Fox Street in the shopping center that always floods, now that I’m not in the market for baby Jordan 1s anymore. At one point, we had matching gray sweatsuits and sneakers. But we also just had a lot of clothes. My wife and I had bought him so many clothes.
But so had her parents, and my parents. And we’re old parents—eh, let’s go with older parents—so we got a bunch of hand-me-downs. Most of the time, this worked out. Several friends gave us expensive baby gear, even sometimes bringing it over themselves. “Thank you for getting this stroller out of my garage,” a friend’s wife said to me with a giant hug.
But all these friends also gave us a ton of clothes, which is great! We could use them, and we’ve passed them along to others as our son has outgrown them. But, oh, where do we put them? Our house is big, and we are overflowing with baby clothes at basically all times. This might have happened even without our own purchases, but we also just have new baby clothes, and there is no time to wear them all. Why did we buy any ourselves? It’s not the money. I just told you we bought things at Ross Dress for Less, and did you see Monica + Andy finally got an actual Shopify theme on their warehouse page and it’s easier to browse now? Oh, such cute gear. The TJ Maxx on the Main Line has like $50 sleep sacks for $10! We felt like thieves!
I guess the previous few sentences explain why we bought so many baby clothes, despite receiving them at all times as well. Still, we did not need them. Now that I think about it, in many ways the worst thing I bought this year was also the best. Is there another entry about commerce in this year-end package? - Dan McQuade
Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik
On the fan-to-hater spectrum, I am firmly in the "fan" camp. I like to like things other people like! I don't find it fun to hate a thing that is popular. That's why I bought Lili Anolik's Didion & Babitz the week it came out, and unfortunately, I regret it.
I have complicated feelings about Anolik's work. I really like the things she likes: gossip, recent literary history and scenes, meditations on what makes an it girl. I was extremely excited when her podcast Once Upon a Time ... at Bennington College came out in 2021, because I'm a ho for Donna Tartt. But the season was about six episodes too long in my opinion, and the script suffered from a deleterious lack of editing that allowed Anolik to indulge her own writerly voice at the expense of an effective narrative. I also hated the digressions about Tartt's sex life and gender identity, which felt gawking and unnecessary. And yet, I listened to every episode because I enjoyed the juicy tone and living inside the world of the 1980s Bennington crew.
I was apprehensive going into Anolik's latest book, Didion & Babitz, but the prospect of a new kind of biography that reexamines two of the past century's most iconic literary it girls was too seductive. I went in with an open mind.
I made it about 50 pages before I gave up. All the problems I had with the Bennington podcast were amplified in this book. There's something to having a distinct voice, which Anolik certainly has, but what value does that serve if the voice renders the text incomprehensible?
This is one sentence that set me off—try to read it in a straight line, I dare you:
Hopps had convinced Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1917, turned a urinal upside down and signed it, thereby bringing into being Pop Art and postmodernism—Duchamp: "It's art if I say so"—as surely as he'd laid waste to Western culture and thought—Duchamp: "It's art if I say so"—to let the Pasadena Art Museum host his first retrospective.
I really wanted to like this book, but it makes me so angry that I can't even bring myself to finish the whole thing to give it a proper review. The only thing that comforts me is knowing my local indie bookstore got a cut of the $30 that it cost. - Alex Sujong Laughlin
Stupid Cat Tower
Over the summer, I adopted a cat. It happened in the way I’m told a lot of pet adoptions do: very slowly and then all at once. I’d long thought about owning a cat; after living for three years with a sweet tabby owned by my former roommate, I felt well-acquainted with the particulars. I started looking on Petfinder in late August, with the expectation that I might have a cat by the fall. Instead, on a rainy day in the first week of September, I found myself in the back of an Uber clutching a carrier to my chest, feeling for the first time a warm weight I’d soon memorize. I hadn’t even bought a litter box yet, or litter, or cat food. But there he was, small and scared and so trusting that my heart cracked wide open.
Over the past few months, we’ve learned about each other. He bites more gently and no longer hesitates before sprawling on the couch. I’ve learned how far a kiss on a forehead can go and how afraid he is of street noise. Which brings me to the cat tower.
I’d been told by the people whose backyard Oliver had been living in that he was both an avid climber and hunter. A bird feeder had to be removed because the sport had gotten too easy for him. In an effort to protect my bookshelves, I purchased a multi-tier cat tower within a week of his arrival. After checking Reddit, I made sure to install the palatial structure near a window with a stimulating view of the city street.
The little shit hasn’t looked at it once.
Meanwhile, I can’t look away. Every time I open my eyes to face the day, there it is, looming from a corner of my bedroom, haunting me. Friends have suggested that I move it. Honestly, I’m too lazy and perhaps too stubborn. He’s got to get over this fear at some point, I tell myself. Significant progress has been made: Right before I left the city for the holidays, I caught him perched on the window ledge right next to the cat tree, watching the street below him. - Rachelle Hampton
At Least 17 Months Of A Service Called Chegg
I recently stumbled upon the financial equivalent of finding the desiccated husk of a dead rat curled up beneath your fridge (so that explains the smell!). I had just logged into an old bank account—one that I was in the process of divesting from, and had not used in months—and saw a new charge for $9.95 that I didn't recognize. Huh, I thought. That's weird. The charge was labelled "CHEGG," a word that had absolutely no meaning to me. Was it the name of an artisanal Asian beverage shop, one that peddled delicious drinks brimming with jellies of various texture? But I hadn't had such a delicious drink in months. No, I realized. It must be a scam or something. But when I scrolled down, I saw I had a charge from CHEGG every single month going back to July 2023—a truly excellent scam, I thought. I googled and learned that Chegg was a company in "education technology," which apparently allows students to rent textbooks and, by extension, cheat? I felt awash in shame, before realizing I am not a student. What could I have been cheating on?
I tried to log on to Chegg but, having no memory of ever purchasing this service, did not know my username or password. When I searched in my email, I was receiving emails from Chegg, indicating I must have had an account linked to my email. I used "forgot my password" to break into my account—what a strange thought, as I truly do not remember ever making one—where my old, expired credit card information had indeed been stored. How had Chegg acquired the information to my debit card? I quickly canceled my subscription and tallied my loss: $169.15 of payments to Chegg for services I had never even used. I should have been allowed to cheat at least once, what with all the dough I'd funneled into this company.
I mourned what Chegg had stolen from me. Imagine how rich I'd be if I'd invested such a princely sum! So let my comeuppance be a lesson to you all: Check your bank statements to cancel your unused subscriptions, especially ones you don't remember making.
Postscript: I just learned that Chegg is "on its last legs"—on its last Cheggs!—after ChatGPT plummeted Chegg's stock down 99 percent. Finally, ChatGPT doing some good in the world! - Sabrina Imbler
Your Bullshit
The answer here is the omnibus answer that operates as a full life cozy, to wit: Your bullshit.
Whoever you are and whatever it was, you hurled your torrents of bullshit ceaselessly, nights, days and weekends, dawn to next dawn and holidays included, and we could only resist so much of it. Every pundit in all areas, especially in the ultrabullshit-friendly worlds of sport, culture and politics (except of course Defector, because unlike the rest of you social criminals, we are always good and kind and prescient and with this one exception as optimistic as a spaniel puppy), delivered yeomanlike work in these areas. Be it election prognostication and analysis, Wicked, Elon Musk explaining anything, the growing dungheap of international relations, Aaron Rodgers, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, Manchester United, Bluey, medical ads with more dangerous side effects than benefits, Snoop Dogg as the new Sham-Wow guy, officiating and complaining about officiating, Gregg Wallace, pro football as the center of American popular culture, college football as the center of American popular culture for those who hate pro football, high school football both in concept and execution (hello, Comrade McKenna), John Fisher and everyone who has ever worked for him, Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift backlash, and even Junior Taskmaster (love Rose Matafeo and Mike Wozniak, hate made-for-TV-precocious children). And a thousand billion more; add your own at the bottom, because we know you commenters prefer commenting on each other's comments than the stuff you read or hear here. Self-involvement is part of the bullshit, too.
As near as we can tell, this is the sort of cultural cycle of excitement and disillusion that passes our way every few decades. This is one of those fallow periods, or at least it seems like it. But the bullshit comes with the people who think all the bad stuff we know about is actually good, or worse, actually sells us on the notion that they know what comes next. COVID was predicted by scientists and we reacted by rejecting science, which is always a good sign of a species that is estate planning its own extinction. The point is we know too much and not enough simultaneously, and the noise is more deafening and harmful than illuminating and comforting.
Well, except Junior Taskmaster. At some point you have to believe in something, and in lieu of anything better, it may as well be Alex Horne. - Ray Ratto
