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31 Aug 18:21 • Patrick Redford

Kalshi Lawsuit Pits States Against Trump Family’s Corruption Machine

On Friday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 3-0 ruling against Kalshi, a ruling that in theory gives states the power to regulate the "prediction market" platform. However strong that sounds, one can't fairly characterize the decision as authoritative. While ...

Defector
31 Aug 18:21 • Giri Nathan

Novak Djokovic Pukes And Crumbles At The U.S. Open

For the first time in over 20 years, Novak Djokovic lost his first-round match at a Slam. On Sunday he fell in five sets to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, a 25-year-old clay-court specialist appearing in just his third-ever U.S. Open main draw. In other words, the sort of oppo...

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31 Aug 16:48 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Chelsea Contains Thrilling Multitudes

Two matches into a new Premier League season is the perfect time to overreact. One match is a fluke; three matches feel too real. Two matches, however, give an overeager observer just enough pattern recognition to make claims that far exceed reality. This is doubly true if a...

Defector
31 Aug 16:48 • Mike Tanier

Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Houston Texans

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

Your team: Houston Texans.

Your 2025 record: The Texans won 12 games last year. Their defense stomped around like King Ghidorah ravaging Tokyo. Their offense puttered along like a dump truck with two flat tires and one square one.

Defector
31 Aug 16:48 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, Aug. 31: Prepare For Trouble, And Make It Double (Themeless)

We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund contr...

Defector
31 Aug 14:48 • Tom Ley

Daejon Love Will Go Down As A Scammer For The Ages

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Oregon. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love a...

Defector
30 Aug 20:39 • Rachelle Hampton

Dolly Parton Prepared Us For The End

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of twe...

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30 Aug 18:12 • Brandy Jensen

Don’t Forget The Nails

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough lig...

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30 Aug 15:06 • Peter Coviello

Dolly, Josephine, And Me

Like all people not gravely deficient of soul, I teared up a little when I heard Dolly Parton died. I am by nature something of a patch of soft pavement—easily impressed upon —and so there’s not much surprising here. What was odd came a bit later when, attending to the funerary rites proper to these exhaustingly online days, I scrolled through one performance after another. There was an inner tumult, an upwelling excess. Soon enough I wasn’t merely damp-eyed; I was choked up; I snuffled; I was, you would have to say, losing some real quantity of my shit.

Here’s the odd part: More or less the whole time I was thinking of my mom, an Italian-American lady from the East Coast in her middle-80s who is very much alive, and isn’t much at all like Dolly Parton. Except, perhaps, for how she is.

Defector
28 Aug 20:42 • Tom Ley

It’s No Longer Reds Week

Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here.

Normal business resumes on Monday. Onward.

Defector
28 Aug 20:24 • David Roth

Aristides Aquino Thumped While The Thumping Was Good

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporar...

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28 Aug 18:27 • Kate Wagner

There Is Only One Lesson Of Red Vienna

Two things are true about me: I hate rich people and I love architecture. These days, that presents a terrible contradiction because only the extremely rich are able to finance the perpetuation of architectural production, whether in the form of new and interesting houses or...

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28 Aug 17:30 • Sabrina Imbler

Why Does The Red-Lipped Batfish Look Like That?

Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel, the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye, and the eternal frown of the sea toad. These spooky fish's great and insurmountable distance from us might offer som...

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28 Aug 17:12 • Dave McKenna

I’m A Redhead, So Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Of Lidocaine)

Redheads feel your pain. And then some.

I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor.

See, I must’ve flinched more than the Hopkins doc thought I should when she commenced to burn my flesh, because she stopped the procedure to ask, “Did you used to be a redhead?”

Defector
28 Aug 16:57 • Drew Magary

Why Your Team Sucks 2026: San Francisco 49ers

Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: San Francisco 49ers.

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

Defector
28 Aug 16:30 • Israel Daramola

We Caught These Teams Playing Imaginary Football Redhanded

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: College football is back! Sort of! Week 0 exists in a strange reality all its ow...

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28 Aug 16:06 • Tara Ariano

The Cozy-Looking Sweaters In ‘Reds,’ Ranked

My Grandma Powell was a knitter. She’s still alive, but she’s too old now to knit. Before there were YouTube tutorials, or YouTube, or the internet, she taught herself how to do it. She spent years knitting sweaters, scarves, mittens, and toques (Canadian for "beanie") for h...

Defector
28 Aug 15:42 • Patrick Redford

Who Needs Life On Mars When It Has Glacial Spiders?

Is there life on Mars? That's the wrong question. Every time scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, or any other terrestrial organization bring news back from Mars of fresh discoveries in the hunt to find evidence of life on the fourth planet, I find myself mildly...

Defector
28 Aug 15:33 • Chris Thompson

Let’s Make Some Romesco, Not Only Because It’s Red, But Because It Rules

When I learned that Defector would be running Reds Week for its random annual late-summer theme week, I had one thought: Man, I really wish I had another week of time off to spend. Every year, Tom Ley announces the theme of theme week, and people start kicking around story i...

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28 Aug 15:33 • Lauren Theisen

I Went To A Reds Game And The Sky Was Red

A few different times when I was in my teens, my dad, my younger brother and I would go on a sports-themed road trip. This particular one 12 years ago took us from our home in suburban Detroit to baseball games in Cincinnati, Louisville, and finally St. Louis. I have good me...

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28 Aug 15:33 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Before ‘Red Dead Redemption,’ There Was ‘Red Dead Revolver’

There's a mission about halfway through Red Dead Revolver that I have not forgotten even in the 22 years since I first played Rockstar's original Western. It's called "The Traitor." The player takes over the villainous General Javier Diego of the Mexican army in a flashback,...

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28 Aug 15:33 • Kelsey McKinney

Possible Red Card: The Beatles Movie Wigs

Four movies about The Beatles are currently in production. There will be one movie for each Beatle, and director Sam Mendes has said that the four movies will be the "first binge-able theatrical experience." No one has explained exactly what this means yet. Will all four be ...

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28 Aug 15:33 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

“The Red-Headed League” Is A Sherlock Holmes Mystery That Can Laugh At Itself

I was a Mystery Kid, and every Mystery Kid knows how that goes. Only stories of remarkable children—Nancy Drew, Frank and Joe Hardy, Encyclopedia Brown—could enliven my unremarkable life. Recently I was marveling to my parents that so many Encyclopedia Brown storie...

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28 Aug 13:30 • Amy Schneider

13 Short Blogs About The Cincinnati Reds

The origin story of the Reds goes like this: In 1869, just after local boy and war hero Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as president, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the very first entirely professional baseball team. They were later a charter member of the National Lea...

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27 Aug 19:21 • David Roth

Just A Minute More, With Tim Marchman

Generally you would not want to use a word like "catharsis" in relation to a podcast. That is just not what they are for, in my opinion, and it's not really in my range as a podcast co-host or guest to deliver that sort of experience. While last week's episode announcing the...

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27 Aug 18:39 • Abigail Segel

The NWSL’s Golden Boot Race Is Red Hot

Across the 2024 and 2025 NWSL seasons, Temwa Chawinga scored 35 goals—more than many players could hope to score in their entire careers. She won the Golden Boot and MVP both years, and deserved to. The Kansas City Current forward was simply inevitable. There’s a real pleas...

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27 Aug 17:36 • Sabrina Imbler

Let’s Remember Some Publications That Said We Would Get To Mars By 2026

Good science journalism is by its nature suspicious of grand or outlandish claims. Good science journalism does not take press releases at face value, but rather investigates the evidence behind those claims and the context in which they appear. Good science journalism is mo...

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27 Aug 17:06 • Drew Magary

Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Buffalo Bills

Some people are fans of the Buffalo Bills. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Buffalo Bills. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: It was an interception. Get over it. Your ...

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27 Aug 16:45 • Ray Ratto

Historic Cincinnati Comeback Offers A Stirring Testament To The Power Of Reds Week

So who believes in Reds Week? The Reds, you fools. The Cincinnati Freaking Reds. And all the rest of you cynical apostates do too. If you didn't know it before, you damned well know it now. And not just for historical, electoral, or tonsorial reasons, either. We're tal...

Defector
27 Aug 16:15 • Lauren Theisen

Defector Music Club Gets Back Together For Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’

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.