Dez Reads. Beach tests the limits of our HR department.

I don’t think there is a newsletter in Washington that generates the kind of whiplash our first two Dez Reads submissions do this week.

Sam zooms out on modern sports media with a look at Jomboy, who creates some of my favorite content on the internet. The creator economy works for slow sports just as well as it does for video games and memes. This is heartening.

Then we get to Nathaniel Beach’s entry, which you can read for yourself. It has to do with marsupial genitalia and our HHS Secretary. If you want to know what kind of boss I am, I didn’t edit a word.

Helen continues her war on Ticketmaster with a gleeful report on a jury verdict affecting Live Nation; Katie tells Gen Z to stop being weird online; and we welcome new Dez hire Ava Sheehan, who is leveling up our internal creative capabilities. She looks at parody brands as new engines for societal change (and market share).

Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.

Here we go.

Slow News is Good News.

The New Yorker. How Jomboy Is Changing the Way Baseball Is Watched.

The gutting of the Washington Post sports section provoked a reaction now expected and unsurprising in the rapidly contracting world of legacy media. A stunning announcement, followed quickly by gnashing of the teeth and launching of the Substacks. I was part of the frustrated crowd – I’ve relied on Neil Greenberg’s Kentucky Derby analysis for years – but the predictable performance did seem to have lost some of its fury.

Sports are more popular than ever. Baseball, once looking like a slipping competitor to basketball and soccer for eyeballs and interest, has come roaring back. Aiding and abetting this return is Jomboy Media, the viral sensation which has grown from two guys with dry breakdowns of mundane baseball moments to a modern media company with more than 60 employees. Revenue has doubled in the past two years, Major League Baseball has an ownership stake, and the glib commentary delights millions of viewers each week.

Jomboy Media works across sports, but it really owns the baseball landscape. Why? “The secret is that Americans like slow sports,” founder Jimmy O’Brien told The New Yorker this week. “[Baseball] moves at a conversational pace. It gives you time to think and talk about things.” Maybe the speed and the outrage are getting to us all. Maybe, just maybe, Jomboy has recaptured what other sports media have lost: the art of the conversation.

– Sam Jefferies

Field Research.

New York Post. RFK Jr. once chopped off a dead racoon’s penis to ‘study later’ while on a family road trip.

The brain worm took the wheel of the Kennedy family road trip.

I can’t help but wonder how The Onion must feel predicting the future at this point, but I guess RFK Jr. is trying to prove the haters wrong that he’s not enough of a “scientist” to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Somewhat shockingly, pulling over during a trip with his family in the car to cut the [HR REDACTION] off a dead raccoon for unexplained future studying isn’t even the wildest Kennedy family road trip animal carcass retrieval moment in the books. The man who declared war on processed food has also strapped a whale’s head to his car, ditched bears in central park, and turned his wife Cheryl Hines’s Curb Your Enthusiasm role into useful life experience.

That being said, it would be poor journalism to not include the ever-eccentric HHS Commissioner’s defense of his peculiar hobby, so from the words of RFK Jr. himself: “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.”

Say what you will about RFK Jr.’s “Eat Real Food” initiative, but I really don’t want to know what his self-proclaimed carnivore diet consists of…

– Nathaniel Beach

Ticketed and Robbed.

Billboard Pro. Live Nation Verdict: Jury Says Concert Giant Is an Illegal Monopoly in Total Defeat.

The verdict against Live Nation and Ticketmaster confirms what all of us already knew: the system is rigged and we’re the ones footing the bill.

In 2023, I shelled out an obscene amount for nosebleeds to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour with no real choice about where or how to buy my ticket. When one company controls the venues, the ticketing, and the promotion, “take it or leave it” becomes the only option and prices skyrocket by design.

Mystery fees, “platinum” markups, and dynamic pricing spikes are baked into that monopoly power, not glitches in the system. The jury’s decision is a long overdue acknowledgment that fans have been squeezed for years. Now regulators have to decide whether they will actually break Live Nation’s grip so the next time I see my favorite artist, I’m not paying luxury prices to sit in the rafters.

– Helen Taylor

Maxxing Out.

The Atlantic. People are Thinking about Looksmaxxing All Wrong.

Most of us know about the manosphere (which you can read about in last week’s Dez Reads) but as with any internet realm, it often comes with its own new jargon.

One of the core phrases in this world is “(enter any verb or noun)-maxxing.” Most commonly used with Looksmaxxing and jestermaxxing, but you could get away with anything. Most Gen-zers will know what fiber-maxxing and fertility-maxxing are without a second thought, really anything you’re doing can now be explained by ‘fill in the blank’-maxxing.

This Atlantic article hits on the Gen-Z internet culture reality: “The online life is an extremist one, and the result is fatigue-maxxing.” It’s the maximalist version of the old saying, “something worth doing is worth doing right.” But I prefer a different mantra: Perfect is not the enemy of good. The last thing we need is young adults maxxing out two things in life and letting the rest fall by the wayside.

So maybe, in this framework, the only thing that should be maxxed is your life on the whole. Let’s start an internet trend of being well-rounded again.

– Katie Runkle

Mumumelon’s “Deliberate Shameless Dupes” Expose Fashion’s Sustainability Gap.

Fast Company. ‘We stole Lululemon’s designs and made them less terrible for the environment’

Are your Elevate Leggings and ABC Pants destroying the planet? The dupe activewear brand Mumumelon thinks so.

Lululemon is no stranger to controversy. The multibillion-dollar athleisure brand has faced litigation over greenwashing, inflated stock prices, and overpromised quality. This month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into whether Lululemon uses toxic “forever chemicals” (PFAS) in its athletic wear. Created by Serious People alongside advocacy group Action Speaks Louder, Mumumelon presents itself as a fake athleisure brand “violating copyright, not the planet.” Assembled in just weeks, the campaign’s sustainable dupes demonstrate a low-emissions, renewable-powered supply chain.

Remember Lululemon’s iconic black and white reusable bag? The typographic-driven design featured the brand’s original manifesto, including the line: “what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” Confusion and mistrust emerge when an environmentally conscious ethos is marketed despite rolling back public sustainability targets that cause emissions to rise.

The critique is less about the industry-wide challenge of decarbonization and more about the widening gap between stated brand values and measurable progress. Mumumelon reframes the conversation by offering a working model rather than a protest, suggesting that large-scale change, while complex, is not purely hypothetical.

So, while the Lululawyers might sue-sue, consumers are learning that reaching sustainability goals isn’t totally delulu.

– Ava Sheehan

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