The actor Eli Gelb has really found a niche for himself as "unassuming guy in a three-hour play who's able to avoid getting directly hit by the drama." Before catching him in Birthright, the new off-Broadway play from Jonathan Spector, I'd last seen Gelb as the sound enginee...

In many ways, the sunfish could not have been better-designed as an orca's chew toy. The largest species, the oceanic sunfish Mola mola, can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh up to 6,000 pounds. And yet it is almost unfathomably helpless. Its body resembles a serving platter...

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

Your team: Las Vegas Raiders.

In some ways, the omnipresence of mystery in everyday life can be comforting. Why is it always cold at the end of the hallway? How did my cat make that noise at 2 in the morning? Why does my car’s brake light keep going out on the driver’s side? Sure, there may be explanations, but I’m not going to be the one to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t grow up watching Ghostbusters aspirationally. 

Today’s gossip raises the age-old question: Who you gonna call? If your house might actually be haunted and your kids are freaking out, you’d better come up with an answer.

https://youtu.be/tVM4RvqxBak

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, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life.

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VOIRON, France — Last week, my colleague Jonny Long from Escape Collective (EC) remarked that he speaks to more old people at the Tour de France than he does the whole rest of the year. It's true, and not altogether surprising: France has an aging population, so they have ol...

ESPN staff was hit by another round of layoffs this week, which in some sense barely registers as news given that the network is stuck in a constant state of downsizing. This round of cuts was notable, however, due to some of the recognizable names that were let go: Karl Rav...

There's not a lot of NBA news happening right now, so we must welcome any sort of chaos we can find, even of the accidental kind.

On Tuesday night, the excruciating wait for LeBron James to make up his damn mind about where he is going to play next season wore down the faculties of at least one social media employee, as the Miami Heat accidentally published an unlisted video on its YouTube that signaled LeBron's introductory press conference for the team he won his first (and second) title with will happen on July 27.

https://twitter.com/WadexFlash/status/2079742594586952066

"The city was question and answer in one," Colson Whitehead writes early on in Cool Machine, the final novel of his Harlem Trilogy. "Cause and effect and everything else, too." You can forgive the lifelong New Yorker for being a little romantic about his hometown, which is b...

The San Francisco Giants are a rotten, poisoned, blighted organization. I offer to the jury, by way of evidence, the following exhibit: Monday evening, a representative of the Giants saw a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about fans who still feel hurt and angry over t...

PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Sh...

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 food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the footb...

A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At l...

"Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." As it is in life and love, so it is in soccer. From the outset, the 2026 World Cup was sure to mark an ending for Lionel Messi—not to his career as a whole, and likely not even to his days with the Argentina national team, ...

This is the fourth MLB season with a pitch clock, so one might think that any beef around the rule change has long ago expired. But José Caballero's got a huge supply of dry-aged steak in the walk-in freezer. The Yankees' base-stealing utilityman, who hits just a tick below...

While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis. Men are in trouble. The "masculinity crisis" is real. The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, relig...

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — After several years of lurking in the shadows, the specter of doping once again looms over the Tour de France. Though nobody has tested positive—or no positive test results have been made public—the biggest story at this year's Tour is a renewed agg...

Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason."

The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that person will soon be excitedly detailing hours-long conversations they had with their computer.

So how far gone is Sirianni?

Just as every film is really about filmmaking, isn't every film also an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey? The hero's journey. The antihero's journey. The road trip movie. The war movie. Movies set in space or at sea, in the middle of a treacherous jungle or a barren desert....

A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story.  If given the opportunity, FIFA would have very happily stripped ever...

On Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Atlanta Hawks, and Dallas Mavericks completed a three-team trade that was depressing for at least two big reasons. The first reason: Just two years after being selected first overall in the NBA Draft, Zaccharie Risacher has been kicked ...

Well, well, well, would you look at that. We have a fancy new website. This redesign is the result of a lot of hard work by our esteemed partners at Lede, and they have provided us with a homepage that is much more customizable. We now have the ability to highlight specific stories, coverage areas,…

And let the conspiracy theories begin. George Russell had spent the past three race weekends painstakingly narrowing the gap to his wunderkind Mercedes teammate in the Drivers Championship standings. Luck, for once, fell in his favor. And then on Sunday, at the Belgian Grand...

One Defector intern explains baseball to another.

Sohini: When I used to call it boring, my dad used to tell me that baseball is a game of immense strategy. I didn’t doubt him exactly, but it did carry the vibe of “Dad saying stuff to fit in with other dads.” I never took the time to familiarize myself with that strategy, and have instead treated the handful of baseball games I’ve been to as loud, fun, kitschy bars. So when it came time to fact check a baseball blog in the process of obtaining this internship, I had to first familiarize myself with obscure concepts like “dingers,” “extra-base hits,” and “Mookie Betts.”

Sarah, this is My Fair Slugger. I am Eliza Doolittle, and you are Henry Higgins. By the end of this blog, I hope you will transform me from someone who doesn’t know the top of a bat from its bottom into a tobacco-chewing baseball savant. 

Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the depar...

Count your blessings: There's a new Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. This is Brian and Geoffrey’s second collaboration at Defector. The player at 11-Down in their first puzzle&nbsp...

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Exactly 84 minutes after Jonas Vingegaard spiked his right collarbone into a curb and limped into an ambulance and out of the Tour de France, the assembled press watched him gingerly wince his way down the steps of the Visma bus and into a waiting t...

It seems somehow right and proper that the final game of the World Cup was such a screeching drag, if only to remind us that the chief byproduct of a global anything is for most of the participants and supporters to grouse about how it ended. I mean, Spain had a great time, ...

The World Cup kicked ass, as it almost always does, but Sunday's final between Spain and Argentina was a well-timed reminder that the game is not always as beautiful as it has been over the last month. And in the immediate aftermath we were served up another reminder, that no matter how capable the World Cup is of redeeming itself through what happens on the field, shameless venality is never far away. For example, it might plant its hideous form squarely in frame for the post-championship photo op, and then try to play dumb when told to get the fuck off the stage.

https://youtu.be/ojcs-mLcBY0?t=197

Well, at least Gianni Infantino finally got to do something useful.

It sure looks like Spain has found the formula for winning World Cup finals. All it takes is a truly hideous game, marked by defensive intensity and borderline tackles, and a late goal from a Barcelona player. In the Wario to the 2010 final, Spain beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 t...