Some time ago, if you asked me for an example of the most romantic, childhood dream–ass achievement for a baseball player, I probably would have pointed to Bryson Stott's home run against the Miami Marlins in the 2023 NL Wild Card series: a first-pitch grand slam with the cr...

We’ve all been there. We’ve all done something so incredibly stupid that we wish the Earth were flat so we could walk off the face of it. We’ve all thought to ourselves, I hope nobody saw that, only to turn around and see that yes everybody saw that and oh god now the police...

Some people are fans of the Washington Commanders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Commanders. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Washington Comma—OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN

https://twitter.com/ChadwikoTWW/status/1985195970687373778

Fans of the Portland Trail Blazers should prepare themselves for a very unpleasant time. Tom Dundon, the team's new owner, is digging in. Arena renovations would improve the value of his property, and so he wants arena renovations. He is simply and resolutely refusing to com...

I started reading Valley of the Dolls for the first time the other night. It opens in 1945, with Anne Wells landing in New York and securing a job as a secretary at Henry Bellamy’s theatrical agency. She’s been tasked with finding an apartment for Henry’s handsome business p...

There are the very special episodes that Drew and I do before heading off on vacation, and then there are the rarer ones we do while one of us is on vacation. This week's installment was one of those, as Drew joined from a beach house in an undisclosed—well, he mentions it w...

Some people are fans of the Cleveland Browns. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cleveland Browns. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Cleveland Browns.

https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mqpa4rnsfs2h

UEFA, Europe's soccer confederation, confirmed on Thursday that it was not making empty threats over FIFA president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell the World Cup off to private investors. In a statement titled "Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 national associations" po...

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has th...

Major League Baseball's upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don't. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a third of the league's teams keep forgetting to try, so on—is both true enou...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. We are just over the halfway point of the year, and after a robust first quarter, the first half of 2026 has turned out to be a fascinating year of musi...

Everyone believes their generation is uniquely maligned; invariably, so do I. The formative years of my generation—I’m at the older end of the dreaded Gen Z—vanished within the global despair and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. In lieu of the presence of other human beings,...

On Tuesday night, a small group of weirdos held an anti-trans rally outside of the Seattle Storm's home arena. The occasion for their gathering was a game against the Indiana Fever and bench player Sophie Cunningham, who had recently participated in an ESPN profile where she...

Imagine how good it would feel to pluck the regulation-size basketball off the top of the Larry O'Brien trophy and get some shots up. Sure, you'd need to adjust your jump shot to account for its construction—sterling silver with a 24-karat gold vermeil—and you'd need a brave...

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Justin answers a question about discipline.

---

Well, that mystery has been solved. Kyle Shanahan was fishing around for his dropped phone while driving at 20 miles per hour when he crossed into the other lane and hit a car. There. Everyone satisfied? Great. Show yourselves out, and have a nice day. Well, no. Of course n...

The recently concluded World Cup was the shining example of FIFA president Gianni Infantino's particular brand of evil. It was nakedly greedy, nakedly corrupt, nakedly ugly, and also totally awesome. Infantino's bet was that he could openly screw everyone—fans, teams, refere...

Some people are fans of the New York Giants. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Giants. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: WHAT’S IN THE TENT?! I BET THERE’S FREE CANDY IN THERE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1fJjaYNclo

I think it would be really fascinating to know Kyle Kuzma. The man loves to stride confidently right up to the very threshold of insight...

Let’s be real…the CBA makes sure owners, PE funds and outside investors can eat off NBA team equity, but the players driving the ratings and the merch are treated like short‑term contractors. [...]

...only to suddenly throw a complicated mixtape-style step-back move and fire up an airball.

When you turn your personal life into your business, the lines between boyfriend and coworker can start getting fuzzy pretty fast. How do you handle conflict with your coworker if you know their flossing habits? When things begin to fall apart with a boyfriend, what’s a microinfluencer girlboss with a pair of non-refundable plane tickets supposed to do? 

Life decisions like these call for expert analysis, which is why we called back the Scam Goddess herself, Laci Mosley. 

https://youtu.be/YgYTYa2Gsek

If you are anything like me, you probably have a neck—a neck you take for granted. Maybe you do not think often about having a neck, given said neck's relatively unobtrusive placement below your head and out of your line of sight. Maybe you are trying to look at your neck ri...

Patrick has spent the last three weeks following the Tour de France with our friends from Escape Collective. This post was originally published on Escape Collective on July 27. Defector readers can now get a six-month free trial of Escape Collective, with ad-free and indepen...

Listen to enough sports podcasts, and eventually you will hear someone spit the name of every podcaster's greatest enemy: The aggregators. Oh, how the fellas who talk about sports into a mic for a living love to complain about the aggregators. Don't aggregate this! yelps Zac...

Now that LeBron James has found his newest version of joy with the Fanatics 76ers and the nation has finished chewing over all the ramifications thereof, be they ridiculous and absurd or merely improbable and stupid, the discourse cries out for a new main character in the hi...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about crabs, eating butter by itself, living near a McStadium, and more.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm currently locked into my Why Your Team Sucks duties, so you're getting a somewhat truncated bag today, plus a guest host in this space next week. Be sure to email them here with your deepest, darkest queries. Then I'll be back the week after to give you another helping of my endless bullshit. Got all that? Neato bobeato.

Your letters:

Andrea Pirlo is one of the greatest Italian soccer players of all time. His résumé as a player is impeccable. He won six Serie A titles, two Champions Leagues, and most crucially, the 2006 World Cup. His evolution from a classic trequartista, attacking-style player into one ...

Within a few weeks of the country's highest court giving states permission to ban trans girls from nearly all school sports, the influential right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation made clear its newest target: The rest of girls' and women's sports. Specifically, as la...

Some people are fans of the Tennessee Titans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tennessee Titans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your Team: The Tennessee Titans

Your 2025 record: 3-14, after going 3-14, after going 6-11, after going 7-10. This makes them the worst team in football over the last four years. None of it is a fluke, either, as they also have the second-worst point differential in that period. More important, though, is that the Titans have been genuinely representative of the AFC South for nearly two decades now, and yes, we mean it exactly the way you took it. 

On Monday the visiting Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers by a score of something to something. This is not important. What is important is that there was a squirrel.

With a squirrel's innate mischievousness and ability to completely derail whatever else is going on, the Detroit squirrel spent a couple of innings exploring increasingly precarious locations around the diamond, before a phalanx of grounds crew members and one visiting outfielder were dispatched to remove it from the premises. If you have ever tried to capture a squirrel, you know this was easier proposed than accomplished. There is a reason the official MLB squirrel highlight video is 12 minutes long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJj6D3FPF1M

Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened representatives from 66 different nations on July 16 for a “ministerial meeting” on the resurgence of “political terrorism.” The White House described the summit as the launch of “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnati...