The sounds coming out of me were causing the sleeping baby to stir, so I had to remove myself from the premises. But I had just seen the hand of god steal Game 4 in the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history, giving the New York Knicks a 3-1 series lead, and I was in a city...

There are many people who are capable of watching dramatic sporting events in crowded bars and enjoying themselves. You may be one of them, and you have almost certainly seen them out there erupting in celebration at big moments, or just chanting "U-P-S" at a UPS truck becau...

When I first saw the press release announcing that scientists had harvested yeast from the remains of Ötzi the 5,000-year-old iceman and used it to make a sourdough bread, I admit I was not terribly moved. The announcement smelled like a publicity stunt designed to get Ötzi ...

If OG Anunoby's miraculous put-back of Jalen Brunson's long three is the Hand of God, maybe the play before it was the Brain of Squirrel. It was Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, currently finishing up his ninth year in the NBA, who made a pre-rookie mistake that allowed the Knicks ...

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 recen...

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here.

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Nobody fell in love with France this year, for the same reason nobody fell in love with France in 2022 or 2018. Under Didier Deschamps, the football manager most likely to make you think of Jerry Sloan, the French are deep in flair but play as though every goal they surrender results in the death of a puppy. Deschamps is best described as an "arch-pragmatist," which is the polite way of saying, "He doesn't celebrate his own birthday so don't expect him to celebrate yours."

Consider the perspective of the soccer goalkeeper. Turn the game 90 degrees from how you watch it at home, and observe as the best part of it—your team attacking in the final third—recedes away from you. The players are small, the action muddled. Should your team score, you ...

With 104 games over the next six weeks, and with the United States (along with Canada and Mexico) hosting, the World Cup will be all-encompassing for the near future. Soccer is a very easy sport to get drawn into, especially during a World Cup, but the complexity of the game...

Some games get you thinking about a higher power. Not because it seems like some cosmic force has put a thumb on the scale in favor of one side or the other, but because the game in question produces a result so unlikely, so ornately designed, that it can only have occurred ...

"Accept it. Accept it. It’s an uncontrollable. You cannot change it. Get over it. Get on with it."

Emma Hayes's words may have aspired to equanimity, but her tone betrayed her. Coming off a 2-1 loss to Brazil in São Paolo—the first of two consecutive friendlies played on the Brazilians' turf—the U.S. Women's National Team coach kept coming back to her refrain: the raucous crowds, their opponent's physicality, the officials' (in)competence, and the late start time for Tuesday's match were things the U.S. couldn't control, so best not to dwell on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cPuocsk9BI

The screwworms are here, as we predicted they would be. More than half a century after the parasitic pest was declared eradicated, the insects have escaped containment in South America and made it all the way to Texas, where they have not been seen since 1966. There are now ...

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, Ray answers a question about best practices in being a grandparent.

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Nobody wants to think about officiating, much less talk about it. Joyce Carol Oates knows it. The NBA Finals are no occasion for rational nonpartisanship. The middle ground is out of reach. If I want to say something straightforwardly true about the officiating, like, "Ref...

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here.

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It's quite possible that the best moment of Brazil's 2026 World Cup happened a month before the tournament even started. The day was May 18, the occasion the announcement of World Cup roster. The tension was high, almost all of it weighing on whether or not Neymar, in what would be his first Brazil appearance in two years, would get called up. When manager Carlo Ancelotti did read his name, the country went wild.

As of publication, the New York Knicks maintain a 2-1 edge in the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. It's been an entertaining, nervous, and extremely high-level series, and this week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I sought out two returning champions. Devon Walker...

If the AL Central is like an apartment building, then the Chicago White Sox spent the last few years as a shut-in neighbor with some smelly, unidentifiable substance leaking out from under their front door. It was best to stay as far away as possible. But after the first few...

Recently while picking up a banh mi in my neighborhood, I found myself transfixed by a TV in the restaurant showing what I assumed was a nature documentary. At first the footage soothed: Gentle humpback whales sailing through hazy blue waters and killer whales gliding in pac...

At approximately 11 pm 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 a...

On Dec. 5, 2025, FIFA President Gianni Infantino presented Donald Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, nominally for Trump's "tireless efforts to bring people together in a spirit of peace." I found myself less interested in the cynicism of placating Trump with the sor...

The Stanley Cup Final is, to use the industry term, drunk off its ass. Not one game, not one occurrence has seemed to follow logically from what came before it. Goals are plentiful. Goalkeeping is optional. Leads are temporary, and possibly even cursed: Each of the four game...

Two NFL players were arrested in recent days as part of domestic violence criminal cases. On Monday night, Rams offensive lineman Alaric Jackson was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of felony domestic violence, first reported by NBC4. Earlier on Monday, Broncos outside l...

The World Cup is continuing to suck, and here’s the latest reason why: CBP goons denied referee Omar Artan entry into the U.S., where he was set to become the first-ever Somali to officiate a World Cup game. Artan arrived in Miami on Saturday to attend a mandatory training ...

Blocks of "frozen zones" established by NYPD barricades. Roaming cops and security forces corralling people onto the sidewalk or standing around like an unspoken threat. Leaders' allusions to potential danger so they can justify the militarized spectacle they have set up on ...

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our pre...

So you think Jacob Misiorowski is a big deal, do you? The next big thing in ball, you say? The scourge of hitters now and for years to come? Yeah, well, let's see you do it in Vegas. Throw a hundred on a hot, dry, hundred-degree night in a Triple-A park. Then we'll talk...

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 60 Minutes, LLMs, sandwiches, great history class movies, and more.

Your letters:

Kevin:

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here.

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Every country heading into the World Cup faces pressure, but not in equal amounts. For a side like Brazil, who hasn't won the World Cup in an unacceptable 24 years and hasn't even made it to the semis in either of the last two tournaments, the pressure can be suffocating. That's the type of pressure Argentina had heading into 2022, but thanks to one of the greatest soccer matches of all time coming out in Argentina's favor, the level of pressure heading into the 2026 edition has to be at a decades-long low.

The National Hockey League is no more prone to imitation than any other species of parrot, particularly when something that seems counterintuitive works out well. It is for that reason and that reason only that the news out of Edmonton this day is not as gobsmacking at it se...

In October 2024, a few months before Heated Rivalry was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series Off Campus. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Ke...

Spencer Pratt will not be the mayor of Los Angeles. There should be no need to utter this sentence, much like “You do not have to swallow a rhino whole, tonight” or “Human shit will not rain down from the sky.” Well, of course not. Should I have been worried about that? 

According to more than a few self-styled Serious Thinkers—perhaps still haunted by the shock they experienced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016—who insisted on treating Pratt’s mayoral primary run as a legitimate rebuke of status quo politics: Yes. The Free Press worked harder than anyone has ever worked before to imbue Pratt's candidacy with a sense of “woke Democrats just might lose because of woke” verve.  

https://bsky.app/profile/passantino.bsky.social/post/3mnqlfoemb42g