Alex Laughlin
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on here less frequently | @defectormedia | Normal Gossip co-creator/producer | writer (@harpersbazaarus @poynter @catapultstory +) | she/her
Articles by Alex Laughlin
Mana Shim Walked Away From Soccer, Then She Rebuilt Her Life
Washington Spirit 1 hour ago NWSL Power Rankings matchweek 25: NWSL Shield race down to three SB Nation - Phuoc Nguyen • 1h The playoff picture is starting to take shape, but there are still a few spots up for grabs. The NWSL Shield will be won by Gotham FC, San Diego Wave or Washington Spirit. Meanwhile, the final five playoff spots, including the number four seed and home quarterfinal match still up for grabs.
Mana Shim Walked Away From Soccer, Then She Rebuilt Her Life
Five years ago this fall, The Athletic published a feature in which NWSL players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly opened up about their abusive former Portland Thorns coach, Paul Riley. The story prompted an investigation into how the NWSL handled reports of abuse, and by the end of that year, half of the league's head coaches either resigned or were fired, along with league commissioner Lisa Baird.
The Case Against Exceptionalism
The first line in a Min Jin Lee novel gives you the whole story. In Free Food For Millionaires, it’s “Competence can be a curse.” In her follow-up, Pachinko, it’s “History has failed us, but no matter.” Both establish the thesis and themes of the novels, and of her larger project of writing about the Korean diasporic experience.
How Lucy Yu Learned To Ask For Help
Who among us has not floated the idea of starting a bookstore to our friends and partners, as a way out of the nightmare that is 9-to-5 work and LinkedIn hell? In 2021, Lucy Yu actually did it. She had been unhappily working as a chemical engineer and socking away money, and when she had $40,000 saved, she took the plunge and opened Yu & Me Books, the first Asian American woman-owned bookstore in New York City. Yu & Me Books was the fantasy embodied.
This Is A Cry For Help
At midnight, Taylor Swift released a four-song update to her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which came out last October and had the cultural impact of a Skechers sneaker drop. Despite juicing its commercial success with several variants on the physical copies for sale, responses to the album from critics and fans alike have been lukewarm at best. Certainly nobody that I know liked hearing Travis Kelce’s dick compared to a redwood tree.
Jasper Wang Quit His Corporate Career To Do … This
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people shared on Twitter and in this announcement blog. What I do know from experience is that none of this would have been possible without Jasper Wang.
Annie Dillard Gave It All
Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent. But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us.
How Do I Avoid Becoming A Doomsday Prepper?
I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a feature the New York Times published about the possibility of an 18-month, nationwide blackout.
Defector Music Club Gets Back Together For Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’
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This is Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week, we're discussing Taylor Swift's 2012 pop-rock hit Red. Patrick Redford: I can’t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there’s a sound at the end of the first synth swell in “I Knew You Were Trouble” that sounds just like the jail-cell door slamming closed in Akon’s “Locked Up,” right? Lauren Theisen: I primarily remember the screaming goat remix.
By Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford Verified, Rachelle Hampton Verified, Alex Laughlin Verified, Ray Ratto Verified
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Defector
Verified
The Not-So-Great Defector Make-Off Dares To Attempt A Red Lip
In observance of Reds Week at Defector, Lauren and Alex decided to try a red lip, as modeled in this brief tutorial. Here, in the style of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake-Off, are their results. Lauren: Hi Alex! So as we start with moisturizer, I wanted to ask right up top, what’s your history with red lip, and, I suppose, lip products in general?
Alexander Chee Trusted His Gut
Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok." If, in the years-long dark period when I had an agent but not yet a book deal, an editor had told me exactly what I needed to change about my project to get them to buy it, I would have jumped at the chance.
What Does It Take To Make Big City Dreams Work?
When I asked Morgan Jerkins what she might want to talk about on an episode of Try Hard, she came to me with an idea that was less major life-changing-thunderclap-moment and more the culmination of a million smaller decisions that stemmed from one big one: moving to New York City as a young grad and choosing to build a life.
What Are You Banning When You Ban Influencers?
A couple weeks ago, I bought an apple cider slushie at the farmer's market. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the ice crystals in the slushie sparkled and burst in my mouth with crisp acidity that immediately cooled me down. The cider had been made by the farmers who ran the stand so it wasn't too sweet, just the platonic ideal of apple flavor somehow frozen into slushie form. Before I took another sip, I pulled out my phone to snap a picture of it.
From Baby Trans To Headlining Act
Podcasts Flashpop/Getty Images Flashpop/Getty Images One of the great joys of friendship is getting to see your friends evolve into the person they were meant to be all along. In our 10 years of friendship, I've gotten to watch Jazmine Green reinvent herself a few times, including the development and eventual birth of her alter ego, CMD+Jazmine.
What Will Happen To My Ambition After Children?
To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way.
Trinket Box Purveyors Are Melting Down
Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project only for it to devolve into a site of small scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own town! For a couple of months earlier this year, there was a white box screwed into the outdoor wall of a restaurant on my street. Every time I passed it, people were crowded around it picking out little toys, stickers, and knicknacks that were stashed inside.
There Is No Simple Trick To Making Friends As An Adult
Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images Last week my husband and I hosted a group of friends and acquaintances to celebrate our one-year anniversary of living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We marked the occasion by eating snacks and talking about our respective art practices. At one point, the group went around and said how they knew us and I watched with amusement as most people told versions of the same story: me walking up to them at work, at the coffee shop, at the farmer's market, and introducing myself.
Why Star YouTube Influencer Ingrid Nilsen Quit Her Job
Despite its apparent ubiquity, the career of "online influencer" is so young that the first generation of people to use that title are not only still working, but still young. Ingrid Nilsen was one of the very first beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, and the work she did in her late teens and early 20s created the blueprint for what the industry has become today. A few of her highlights: She was the first online creator to work with CoverGirl, and she interviewed President Obama.
The World Cup’s Most Interesting Newbie Is Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Poker-Playing Manager
The World Cup is great for surfacing fun facts. Here's one that might shock your ears as you watch Bosnia-Herzegovina play its first group-stage game on Friday: The team's coach, Sergej Barbarez, is 54 years old and working his first job as a manager. Also, he was most recently a professional poker player. Don't worry, Barbarez does actually know a thing or two about soccer. He played professionally for 14 years, and was no slouch.
‘Try Hard’ Is Back, Now In Video Form
In my early twenties, a huge part of my job was to convince older journalists in my newsroom to use social media. This is the kind of job that only a young person could have, not just because of my total facility with the social media apps I was proselytizing, but also because only someone with the hubris of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex could summon the confidence to tell a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic that her journalism would be immeasurably improved by her posting on Snapchat.
Wasia Can Be A Lot. It’s Fine.
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 special fact that seemed like it defined me exclusively: I was Wasian.
Lena Dunham Can’t Help Herself
There’s an apocryphal story concerning the original pitch for Girls: Supposedly, Lena Dunham wrote it on the back of a cocktail napkin. It was all vibes but no plot or fleshed-out characters, and situated the show concept somewhere between Gossip Girl and Sex and the City. It was about the sort of girls Dunham—then 23 years old and making a web series in SoHo—knew and was friends with.
They Don’t Have Lip Filler, They Just Have Lip Filler Accent
Recently on the subway I observed a phenomenon in person that I had previously only seen on the internet. Two teenage girls sitting across from me were talking to each other. They were both dressed in the teenage girl uniform—loose-fitting jeans, cropped black jacket, white sneakers—and they were idly tapping their phones as they chatted. That is not the phenomenon I'm talking about. I couldn't look away because one of them was speaking in what I have labeled Lip Filler Accent.
Netflix Has Trapped Pete Davidson In His Garage
People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way to capture and hold a listener’s attention. It’s easier to stumble upon video curated and served via algorithm than it is to click several buttons in a dedicated app in order to listen to a piece of audio.
Meta’s Defense In Social Media Addiction Trial Is Basically A Shrug
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.
White People Online Are Really Excited About Lunar New Year
8 hours ago Rejoice! As we enter Pisces season, we're also getting closer to spring. From February 18th to March 20th, the sun will be splashing around in the enigmatic water sign of Pisces, heightening our intuition, and creativity. This year, Pisces season brings wisdom, reflection, and a lot of wildness in …
White People Online Are Really Excited About Lunar New Year
I’m sure I’m telling on myself by revealing this, but Western astrological readings are a staple of my social feeds. (To tell on myself further: Scorpio sun, Gemini rising, Cancer moon.) I don't necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it either, and when I’m served a video that begins with a person saying “Stop scrolling! This week is important,” I will stop scrolling and pay attention to find out how and why this week is important.
Let's Check In With The Knitting Olympians
Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation.
They Publish Books By "Women And Weirdos" In Their Free Time
Learning that you can just buy ISBNs is like learning that you can just walk into a high-end designer store and touch things. It seems like there should be a more rigorous process to filter out the grubby-fingered like me, but there isn’t. Apparently you can just buy ISBNs online. “It's actually so weird. You go on a website called bowker.com, which is like an independent entity, and it costs like $200 to buy 10 ISBNs,” Mabel Capability Taylor told me.
Olympic Photographers: Stop Doing The Lugers Dirty
4 hours ago MILAN — When Juraj Slafkovský first took the ice as an Olympian for Team Slovakia four years ago in Beijing, he was a teenager, braces on his teeth, the best years of his hockey life still well ahead of him. He scored eight goals and was named tournament MVP as Slovakia won their only Olympic medal …
Olympic Photographers: Stop Doing The Lugers Dirty
Imagine the training for the Olympics. All the work, all the anxiety, the parties missed, and the mornings you'd rather have spent in bed. The money spent on training, equipment, travel, all of it. You sacrifice so much because you are single-mindedly focused on becoming the best. You make it to the Olympics, where you represent your country on the international stage, and for one shining moment, all of the sacrifices seem worth it.
I spent 2025 interviewing people about doing things that terrified themit completely changed how I view resilience and success
I constantly find myself in situations where I've bitten off more than I can chew. I sign up for something a play audition, a local reading, or line dancing thinking it sounds fun.When the day comes, I find myself standing outside a door with knots in my stomach. Sometimes I push through that fear and get to have a wonderful experience. Sometimes I don't.I'm obsessed with these moments because I believe the way we respond to them shapes the lives we live.
Ronald Young Jr. Comes Clean
I didn't consider the possibility of failure enough when I was developing this show. For the last episode of the season I was supposed to have a conversation with Ronald Young Jr., he had been wanting to spend time learning piano and do a small show for his loved ones. But the week I was supposed to record with Ronald he emailed me to admit that he hadn't learned the song on piano, he never had the recital we'd agreed he'd do, and he wasn't ready to record with me. I freaked out for a few hours.
Falling back in love with running
It's the privilege of the young and healthy to be careless with their bodies, and running can be especially rough on what holds a person together.
Falling Back In Love With Running
I started running when I was 14. After many years of playing recreational soccer, I realized that I did not have the skills to compete on the high school level against girls who had played on club teams their whole lives. The older kids in my neighborhood ran cross country and they encouraged me to join. I had played midfield in soccer, a position that demands nearly constant running, so I’d built up a strong stamina.
Zakiya Gibbons Goes Speed-Dating
Before the pandemic, Zakiya Gibbons was everywhere, all the time. Whenever I saw her, she was on her way to another engagement she’d double stacked that day. She’s a people person. A textbook extrovert. But she lived alone during the pandemic, and like a lot of people, all that alone time made her a little neurotic. Suddenly, going on dates started to feel draining, and she experienced a social anxiety she didn’t recognize in herself.
The Bad News Is There’s No More Money, But That’s Also The Good News
RICHMOND, VA - The audience was booing Ira Glass. It was the opening session of Resonate, a podcast festival founded three years ago by Chioke l’Anson at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art.
Josh Plays Pickup Basketball
Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know.
Learning Is More Than Just Collecting Facts
Earlier this week, I read Horace Walpole’s Castle Of Otronto for the first time. Published in 1764, it’s widely considered the first gothic novel, the cornerstone of a genre that would include future works like those of the Brontë sisters, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and eventually all of modern horror.
Podcasts Are Not Television
In the latest move to consolidate the entirety of human expression onto a single screen, Netflix and Spotify have announced a partnership that will bring 16 of The Ringer's video podcasts to the platform, barring them from publishing to YouTube. Netflix has been sweating YouTube's increasing share of television screentime, and clearly sees poaching 16 popular video podcasts and prohibiting them from streaming to YouTube as a way to encroach on its rival's core business.
Sabrina Goes Hunting
Yes, that Sabrina. Yes, hunting. OK, I am kind of messing with you. When I asked Sabs what they would want to try to do for the podcast, they told me they were interested in learning to catch and pin bugs, also known as "collecting" bugs. Does it still count as hunting if the life you're taking is a bug's? This might be my favorite conversation I've had for Try Hard so far.
Ceara (Almost) Learns To Cartwheel
At some point when she was growing up, Ceara Jane O'Sullivan created this whole mythology about Girls Who Can Cartwheel: they're organized, they're determined, they follow through, and they're brave. These are not things Ceara thinks about herself, and, coincidentally, she also cannot do a cartwheel. You see how this becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Defector Has Outlived These Things
Five years is a long time to exist.
Diana Learns To Ride A Bike
Say you're a fully-grown adult who has decided to learn to ride a bike.
Yowei Hosts a Party
In a hundred years, the labels "introvert" and "extrovert" have leapt from Jungian psychology into the realm of personality tests and horoscopes: ways to tell yourself, and the world, What Kind of Person You Are. You risk over-identifying with a set a characteristics cloaked in a semi-medical terminology, which makes it sound more real and immovable. Yowei Shaw, host of Proxy, believes herself to be an introvert.
An Interview With My Grandmother, Who Knows Everyone In Bluegrass Music
Winfield is a sun-bleached spot of a city in the middle of southeastern Kansas’s farmlands. It’s unremarkable except that it is the home of the Walnut Valley Festival, a long-running bluegrass festival that hosts the National Flatpicking Championship. My grandmother, Jane Laughlin, worked at the Walnut Valley Festival—”the Festival,” as we call it—for more than 40 years. The Festival is an outdoor acoustic music festival that attracts musicians from around the world every September.
The Future Of Podcasting Is Here, And It Sucks
This week, Left Of Dial published its Essential Listening Poll, a compilation of the 100 best podcasts of all time, according to industry creators, writers, and scholars (Disclosure: I was invited to contribute my selections to the poll, and Normal Gossip ranked on the list, though I was not allowed to nominate my own show). Lists of this sort, and really of any sort, are inherently imperfect metrics for measuring the impact of any given piece of work.
Erika Learns To Sing
There's this archetype in early 2000s teen movies where the protagonist finally trades the hairbrush she sings into from the safety of her bedroom for a real microphone. There's a climactic performance scene where she reveals her secret talent, and there's a choreographed dance and her crush is usually there, too.
Mattie Goes To A Yoga Class
The first time I did yoga was in a beachside studio in Ewa Beach, Hawaii in 2010. I was visiting my family there for the summer and my mom had recently become a regular at the studio. I remember the smell of incense in the stifling room and the shapes of other womens' bodies prone on their multicolored mats, completely locked into whatever physio-spiritual ritual I had stumbled into.
Alex Laughlin's Small Tire Debut is a Success
This past weekend we were down in Georgia with Alex Laughlin as he competed in his first ever radial vs. the world small tire race "Light Out 9". Going fast is nothing new to Alex, he drives fast cars for a living. This weekend was a new experience for the racer as he would pilot this blown Hemi powered 2012 corvette with an estimated 4,500 horsepower! Small tire racing has been growing in popularity over the last few years. The fastest class to compete in is Radial vs. the World.
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