FeedCity: Defector

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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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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...

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05 Jul 20:09 • Billy Haisley

FIFA Makes Good And Right And Not At All Corrupt Decision To Rescind Folarin Balogun’s Red Card Suspension

The USMNT was the talk of the soccer world in the aftermath of its triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina last Wednesday. Most of the conversation was about the latest amazing U.S. performance in a tournament full of them, and the growing consensus that the Americans should be ...

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05 Jul 16:30 • Kathryn Xu

A Shockingly Positive Review Of World Cup Public Transit In Los Angeles

Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of "public" and "transit," ...

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05 Jul 14:27 • Patrick Redford

Jonas Vingegaard Made It Out Alive, Then Made Barcelona Smile

BARCELONA — "Every swarm needs a face," declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike's new bee mascot, "and every face needs a name." Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was ...

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03 Jul 18:12 • Nicholas Russell

Darren Aronofsky’s AI Videos Are A Fitting Tribute To America, I Guess

Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video mo...

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03 Jul 15:54 • Israel Daramola

25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a ...

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03 Jul 15:54 • Tom Ley

Try To Cool Off In The July 4th Weekend Open Thread

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.

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03 Jul 15:54 • Owen Lewis

‘The Final Set’ Tells The Story Of Tennis’ Greatest Rivalry Becoming A Friendship

There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set, a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: o...

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02 Jul 17:48 • Patrick Redford

Your Guide To The 2026 Tour de France

Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France whil...

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02 Jul 17:21 • A. Frog

The Passion According To A. Frog

Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to unde...

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02 Jul 17:06 • Ray Ratto

Belgium Cannot Be Understood By The Pedestrian Soccer Mind

It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgia...

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02 Jul 16:45 • Sohini Desai

Unlike The Defendants, One Of The Prairieland Judges Is Part Of An Organized Cell of Extremists

Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer ...

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02 Jul 16:18 • Drew Magary

Only A Complete Asshole Would Get Married At Madison Square Garden

This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more...

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02 Jul 15:57 • Drew Magary

OK, This Is Probably Too Much Talk About The KLF

Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discov...

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02 Jul 15:30 • David Roth

Dead Country Fair

Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the s...

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02 Jul 15:30 • Sabrina Imbler

This 17th-Century Flemish Painting Held A Gnarly Bat Secret

To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and u...

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02 Jul 15:30 • Samer Kalaf

Celtics Jettison Beloved Finals MVP For Lapsed Podcaster And Some Picks

The Boston Celtics finally found another team serious about trading for Jaylen Brown. Following a couple of weeks where everyone offered their own opinion about the star's true value, the Philadelphia 76ers came in with a real offer—"real" in that it existed and was accepted...

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02 Jul 13:27 • Tom Ley

The USMNT Suffered In Style

It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch the...

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01 Jul 19:24 • Billy Haisley

Michael Olise And France Are Soccer’s Greatest Evangelists

Though the emotional appeal of soccer is immediate and visceral, especially in the shortcut-to-passion context of an international tournament like the World Cup, the real richness of the game is subtle. The uninitiated often find it difficult to access that depth. For better...

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01 Jul 19:03 • Ray Ratto

The Fish Don’t Stink

The Miami Marlins are a winning baseball team. For now. That revelation comes after one of their finest months ever, a 20-6 run that began, hilariously enough, after being swept in a three-game series by the gangrenous Mets and falling behind them in the NL East race. This w...

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01 Jul 19:03 • Tom Ley

The Game’s About The Ballers

If there's one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we've seen so far, it's this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Michael Olise, Harry Kane—all of these guys have been playing out of th...

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01 Jul 17:57

Liv Takes Miles, With Maitreyi Anantharaman

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was recorded hours before Jalen Duren's representatives committed to using the Sacramento Kings as an unwitting partner in scrabbling a bit of leverage from the Detroit Pistons, which would have been great to talk about, but does not really change too much of the first bit of the show. Maitreyi Anantharaman came back on to talk Duren, Jaylen Brown, and Analyticsgate, but mostly catch us up on the WNBA season. We talked a ton about her incredible Olivia Miles profile, which you should all go read right now!

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

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01 Jul 17:30 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

Trinket Box Purveyors Are Melting Down

Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project only for it to devolve into a site of small scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own town! For a couple of months earlier this year, there was a white box...

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01 Jul 16:27 • Samer Kalaf

ESPN Retracts Article About NFL Player And Dead Woman In Dominican Republic

On June 18, ESPN published a report that connected NFL free agent Mike Pennel Jr. to the death of a woman in the Dominican Republic. This week, the network retracted the article and issued a brief statement.

The article, bylined by T.J. Quinn and Juan Recio, claimed that Pennel had "an ongoing relationship" with Carli Franchesca Guzmán Roche, who disappeared in 2021 and whose body was discovered in January 2026 on Pennel's property in Puerto Plata. The original report, which has since been deleted but can be found at an archived link, cited "interviews with people close to the victim and police records."

Also mentioned in the piece were LeAndre Kemont Jefferson and Tyree Lamont Davis, two of Pennel's friends. In the original article, Pennel denied any connection to Guzmán and said he wasn't in the Dominican Republic at the time. He also added this: