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Defector
09 Jul 13:27 • Vince Guerrieri

The Bears Wouldn’t Be The First NFL Team In Hammond, Indiana

The Chicago Bears are one of the most storied franchises in the NFL. One of just two charter members of the league still playing today (the other being the Cardinals, a somewhat less-storied franchise), the Bears have had a lengthy and stalwart kinship with the City of Big S...

Defector
08 Jul 19:18 • Billy Haisley

Am I The Asshole For Judging The Screen Time Habits Of Other People’s Kids?

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, Billy dives into the tricky question of screen time.

Defector
08 Jul 18:54 • Sarah Borus

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Pitcher Scorned

Spite is a powerful emotion too often cast in an ugly light. To feel slighted or doubted is a natural urge, as is our desire to press our doubters' eyes up against a window to watch as we prove them wrong. We are taught to repress and do away with such unbecoming resentments...

Defector
08 Jul 18:33 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Long-Awaited Blowup Between Skylar Diggins And The Sky Has Finally Arrived

Skylar Diggins, to her credit, isn't one to trade in the classic cryptic fare of her fellow disgruntled athletes. What she writes on social media requires no close reading or careful analysis. There's no Crazy how people switch up on you or TIME WILL TELL&nbsp...

Defector
08 Jul 17:48 • Chris Thompson

What Do The Boston Celtics Intend To Be?

As an online basketball fan, you are encouraged by the discourse to consider the Jaylen Brown trade as a matter of asset valuation. One day the Celtics seemed to consider Brown, the asset, as approximately valuable enough to swap for Giannis Antetokounmpo, plus or minus some...

Defector
08 Jul 17:21 • Drew Magary

Dana White Stars In History’s Worst Truck Ad

Vanity pickup trucks: I fucking hate these things, and so you do. The second I see a Dodge Ram SuperUltraMegaSoldierDuty on the highway, I already know that it'll have a Blue Lives Matter decal splashed across its rear windshield, a pristine flatbed untouched by manual labor...

Defector
08 Jul 16:54 • Jae Towle Vieira

Who Pranks The Pranksters?

Some things are just timeless. Gossip, for instance, has likely been around as long as humans have been able to communicate with one another, and then share someone else’s business. Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old ice man? Probably a gossiper and definitely a messy guy. Something else just as timeless? Pranks!

Normal Gossip is back for its 10th season! Who could have guessed that so many friends had silly, outrageous and harrowing stories they wanted to share with the world. We’re grateful to every listener and everyone who keeps sending us their gossip. To celebrate season 10 we’re bringing back some of your favorite guests and sharing some of the most chaotic gossip ever to grace our inbox! And as you may have heard, Defector is swiveling to video! (We will not use the word “pivot” here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nwoXWiaSz0

Defector
08 Jul 16:54 • Lauren Theisen

The Mets Have Turned It Around 360 Degrees

The crud-ass New York Mets were able to manage a series split on the road against division-leading Atlanta during the long weekend, overcoming severe bullpen issues for 10-9 and 7-6 victories on Sunday and Monday. But before any fan could even begin to think about letting th...

Defector
08 Jul 16:54 • Giri Nathan

You Don’t Have To Love Grass To Win On It

Heading into this year's Wimbledon, neither Coco Gauff nor Naomi Osaka had made a deep run at the tournament, despite winning a total of six Slams elsewhere. Gauff had peaked at the fourth round, and Osaka at the third round, three times apiece for both players. An observer ...

Defector
08 Jul 14:54 • Patrick Redford

The Tour de France’s Infernal Present Portends Its Impossible Future

SAINT-GAUDENS, France — On Monday morning, the Tour de France's media-wranglers sent us all a text announcing something genuinely shocking for such a French organization: They had banned smoking. The ASO said nobody could smoke in the TV areas "in order to combat fire risks,...

Defector
08 Jul 14:54 • Robert Rubsam

‘The Furious’ Kicks Ass

What’s the sickest action sequence you’ve ever witnessed on screen? I’ll give you five. There’s the tea parlor shootout at the top of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, of course, as well as Jackie Chan’s multi-level shopping mall free-for-all at the close of Police Story. William Frie...

Defector
07 Jul 20:57 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Atlanta Dream Are Getting Drowsy

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't pani...

Defector
07 Jul 19:57 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Lionel Messi Refuses To Let Time Win

For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round of 16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anythin...

Defector
07 Jul 19:30 • Drew Magary

The Hot Take Industrial Complex Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Means

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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more.

Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business.

Your letters:

Defector
07 Jul 18:54 • Sohini Desai

Meet The Broadway Actor Teaching Public Defenders How To Win In Court

On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at The Defenders Academy—a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court.

Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a court room has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her back to sharing her talents with public defenders. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Defector
07 Jul 17:48 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Paraguayan Senator Gets Shockingly Racist Toward Kylian Mbappé

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound; players are probably le...

Defector
07 Jul 16:54 • Albert Burneko

Is It Mitch McConnell Or Your Own Sense Of Possibility That Has Been Dead For Weeks

Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well now that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to...

Defector
07 Jul 16:42 • Sabrina Imbler

Plato’s Allegory Of The Crab

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and w...

Defector
07 Jul 15:39 • Ray Ratto

It’s The Hype That Kills

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is. Well, in the wake of Monday night's dopeslap in Seattle, ...

Defector
07 Jul 15:39 • Sarah Borus

America’s Birthday, Brought To You By Gas Station Hoagies

Perhaps it's a sign from Mother Nature that the two flagship events of the Philadelphia's Wawa Welcome America Festival for the semiquincentennial were derailed by weather. Maybe she was telling us to stop this embarrassing exhibition of unbridled nationalism and look inward...

Defector
07 Jul 13:36 • Tom Ley

The USMNT’s World Cup Exit Was Too Sad And Too Familiar

It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team ...

Defector
06 Jul 17:36 • Lauren Theisen

MLB Is Now Promoting A Salary Cap Between Innings

You weren't watching MLB.TV on Sunday, because NBC bought out all of the day's games and locked most of them behind their billions-losing streaming service. But if you were tuned in for out-of-market baseball in the days prior, like I was, you may have been delivered an adve...

Defector
06 Jul 16:48 • Patrick Redford

Gifts, Gritos, And A Breakthrough Win: An Afternoon With The Tour de France’s New And Jubilant Mexican Fanbase

BARCELONA — "Pogito! Hermano! Ya eres Mexicano!" sang the gathered dozens. Over an hour after Isaac del Toro won Stage 2 of the Tour de France, an enthusiastic knot of 40-ish tricolor-clad fans was still patiently at the barriers. Some came from Mexico, some lived in Barcelo...

Defector
06 Jul 16:21 • Chris Thompson

ESPN’s Matt Miller Investigated For Alleged Consumer Fraud While Recovering From Emergency Arm Amputation

Matt Miller, an on-air NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, is presently recovering from, among other injuries, the emergency amputation of his left arm. Probably there are not too many kinds of trouble in Miller's life that measure up against that one. But trouble is waiting, and no...

Defector
06 Jul 16:06 • Luis Paez-Pumar

The Folarin Balogun Red Card Brouhaha Is A Vintage FIFA Disaster

Just a day after FIFA rescind Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round of 16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, t...

Defector
06 Jul 16:06 • Ray Ratto

Poor A’s Fans Can’t Even Get Properly Perfecto’d

If there could have been a story to rival England's Jordan Henderson getting yellow carded and then breaking his arm without actually playing, it would have been Brian Serven homering in the ninth inning of Marlins-Athletics to complete the comeback di tutti comebacks, and that's even allowing for the fact that England-Mexico at the Azteca was arguably a more momentous event than Marlins-Athletics no matter where it was played.

That it was played in West Sacramento just added to the mutant beauty of a day in which the Marlins...

... got seven innings of perfect pitching from Eury Pérez and provided him with a seemingly insurmountable 8-0 lead.

Defector
06 Jul 15:15 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, July 6: We’re Halfway There

Stay in line, and do our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Peggy Sue Marlin, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Peggy Sue works in systems and data automation and enjoys golfing and DIY projects. She won her school spelling bee on the word "cheeseburger," then w...

Defector
06 Jul 15:15 • Barry Petchesky

The Ducks Screwed Themselves

I think it's important we set some axioms for discussion of Anaheim's Leo Carlsson signing an offer sheet with Philadelphia, because it helps a superficially mindblowing contract feel something closer to logical—both in that the Flyers were wise to offer it, and in that the ...

Defector
06 Jul 13:12 • Tom Ley

That’s Why This Shit Rules

Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped The Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness ...

Defector
05 Jul 21:21 • Kathryn Xu

Banger British Grand Prix Ends With A Whimper

Perhaps I can at least thank Max Verstappen for the clarity. Before he ran his Red Bull car into the wall on the 49th of the Silverstone Circuit's 52 laps, the British Grand Prix was shaping up to be too exciting to be coherent. It got off to an uncharacteristically slow sta...