Five years ago this fall, The Athletic published a feature in which NWSL players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly opened up about their abusive former Portland Thorns coach, Paul Riley. The story prompted an investigation into how the NWSL handled reports of abuse, and by the e...

SAN FRANCISCO — Like its sludgy predecessor and by design, Game 2 of the WNBA Finals was played as if in the mud. Clean dribbling of the ball was prohibited, the two participants collaborated on 32 turnovers, and the Atlanta Dream finished one missed three-pointer beyond joi...

For nearly three weeks, a real bet a person could place on the Polymarket gambling app was on "Any of the Cornell 7 charged with a felony sex crime?" The Cornell 7 refers to seven defendants in a civil lawsuit filed last month by a former Cornell University student, saying she was gang-raped by several fraternity members.

No criminal charges have been filed, but after the lawsuit drew national attention, a local prosecutor said on Sept. 28 that his office would reopen the criminal investigation. Two days later, on Sept. 30, a market opened up on the popular gambling platform (though technically it is a "prediction market") to bet on the results of the investigation. The market was not available to bettors in the United States version of the app, but the bet itself was very easy to find. I just punched "Cornell 7" into the search bar and found it pretty easily.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're talking about hockey, Jane Austen, Steven Spielberg, how to start dating, and more.

Drew is off this week, and I'm your substitute. I write about hockey, baseball, and a bunch of other stuff here at Defector. I also just published a book of essays about the movie It's A Wonderful Life, called Every Time A Bell Rings, which I co-wrote with the amazing critic and novelist Emily St. James. It's a great gift for Christmas, but there is no greater gift than being able to answer your letters. So let's get to it.

Ryan:

Without knowing for sure whether this is actually true, we can still surmise that the Washington Commanders felt better about losing Monday night's game than they did about their delightfully grotesque tie against the Giants in Week 5. And we are almost certain the San Franc...

After listening to a critique of the Miss America pageant on a public radio station, Barbara Hammer declared herself a feminist. Then she left her husband. Then she became a lesbian. This was the early 1970s, and it wasn’t long before someone gifted baby gay Hammer a Super-8...

A Weird Star is a classic place-setter in fiction. Put a Weird Star in the sky, even if it never has anything to do with the plot, and you know we're somewhere different and alien. Anything that's clearly not our Sun, and you're cooking with gas. Maybe it's a binary system, ...

For a moment there, it was getting a bit sleepy. In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Tampa Bay Rays were up 3-1 on the Cleveland Guardians: a lead, but not an insurmountable one. Each of their three runs came from plinking away at the Guardians' relievers—the Guardians ...

The moment general manager Chris Ballard was given Fredo's kiss by the Indianapolis Colts' HR department Monday morning, the rumor mill started to churn up replacements. This is bleak work, but consider that the alternative was analyzing how the Colts managed to lose at home...

When last we checked in with Devin Cooley, he was serving as the backup goaltender for one of the worst teams in the league—I mean, downright putrid, couldn't-pay-me-to-watch bad. Not a lot has changed about the Calgary Flames in 11 months. They have two wins so far, second-...

On Oct. 9, the New York Times reported that UFC veteran Tim Kennedy was recovering in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after he'd been shot three times while conducting a deadly, murkily defined operation with Erik Prince's private military group in the remot...

Where the Sacramento Kings are concerned, all "joy" is relative. But this team, which projects to be among the NBA's worst, enjoyed one charming preseason storyline: the apparent revival of Ben Simmons as an actual rotation player. The basketball gods have chosen to deprive ...

College football had its first Blood Week of the season. This weekend saw losses for eight ranked teams, and even the teams that didn't lose had extremely close calls. That brings us to the Miami Hurricanes, who played a big rivalry game with unranked Florida State, which turned into a shootout even though Miami is supposed to have a championship defense and Florida State is Florida State.

After four quarters and two overtimes, Miami beat FSU, 43-35. Saturday's victory came only after two seemingly successful Hail Marys by FSU quarterback Ashton Daniels were consecutively called back. The first was due to a holding penalty on the offense. The second attempt looked like it ended with FSU receiver Duce Robinson having dual possession of the ball, but it was ultimately ruled an interception for Miami.

https://youtu.be/4_VJMwiyUc0?si=yViWmGV5aVqM3Wms

Jalen Hurts's season is over. On Monday, Hurts's agent, Nicole Lynn, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Eagles, released a statement about the quarterback's health situation as it pertains to the blood clot in his leg, an issue that was first revealed publicly on Octotber 15 and which landed Hurts on injured reserve two days later.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DercP9xRobx/?hl=en

The Monday statement sheds more light on what exactly happened since the Eagles' trip to London to face the Jacksonville Jaguars on October 11. The relevant part is also the scariest part:

For eons, roly-polies have rightfully dominated the rolling space, at least in our imagination. The crustaceans' astonishing ability to transform from a legged arthropod into a perfect sphere, a behavior called volvation, earned the bugs their nickname. But the bugs are far ...

Call it a buzzer beating. The reigning WBC super welterweight champ and most interesting man in boxing, Sebastian Fundora, delivered as interesting a knockout as memory serves while retaining his title Saturday night in Las Vegas.  Fundora, the tallest 154-pound champ ...

You know the situation: It's time to solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Enrique Henestroza Anguiano and Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Enrique is a data scientist, crossword constructor, USTA league tennis player, and fútbol fan from Oakland, Calif. Matthew is a stay-at-home dad, crossword constructor, rec frisbee league player, and Ted Lasso fan from Dallas.

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. 

Another new album of old Eva Cassidy recordings, called Jazzed, is about to come out. Cassidy, a peerless D.C. songbird, died 30 years ago next month. Her supply of unheard material ran out long ago. So those who legally control Cassidy's songbook transitioned from mere...

Last week, when the Jacksonville Jaguars played the Philadelphia Eagles in London U.K., I devised a typically great "bit." My idea was to write a piece casting Philadelphians as clumsy oafs, juxtaposed with Jacksonvilleans, who would be portrayed as urbane sophisticates. The...

It's funny, in hindsight, that the first two seasons of Jim Harbaugh's Chargers tenure were considered disappointments. The team won 11 games in each of those seasons and made the playoffs, but two dispiriting losses in the wild-card round produced a feeling that the Charger...

This article contains spoilers for You Can See Everything

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About halfway into Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new A24 movie You Can See Everything, there is a scene that plays like a memory. Nathan Fielder stands, in the present of the movie, inside a San Diego ocean-front house looking out at the crashing waves, remembering. Then, playing for the viewer: two unidentifiable people in the ocean, frolicking, swimming in the icy cold waves, a blonde woman and a brunette man, both tall, both smiling. The camaraderie between them is undeniable.

SAN FRANCISCO — Technically, every basketball game is zero-sum. An offensive rebound is a missed defensive rebound; a basket scored is a basket conceded. But you never feel that fact more acutely than in a game between the Atlanta Dream and the Golden State Valkyries, t...

Nobody got laid at BYU last night, but it looked like a fun party all the same. The eighth-ranked Cougars hosted the No. 2 Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the big primetime slot on Saturday, and they stayed undefeated by squeaking out a 28-24 win. There was some fourth-quarter ...

It was clear that the relationship between Real Madrid and La Liga president Javier Tebas was heading toward disaster when the two parties started bickering in the press less than a month ago, but we've now reached the stage where one is earnestly comparing the behavior of t...

ESPN is reporting that ESPN and the College Football Playoff are close to a deal to expand the playoff field to 24 teams in 2027. This news arrives merely two years after the field already expanded from four teams to 12 teams. Not only was this expansion inevitable, it is un...

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. Ray: It's been a tough year for Texas A&M and coach Mike Elko, who celebrated the Ag...

And so ends the Los Angeles Dodgers' reign as baseball's most overwhelming boogeyman. The poster kids for the omnipotence of money, the belief that having the best player means being the best team, the power of the big market over all it surveys—all of that feels less import...

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

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It's nice having Nigella Lawson in the tent. She is cheerful and radiates serenity, and she takes those big glorious bites. She makes you want to bake and to eat. She even makes you want to share the things you bake with others, so that they too can take a huge cheek-bulging bite of something messy and crumbly and you two can giggle together at the decadence of it all.

The model of Donald Trump currently on display is fussy and sour, poached to glossy and unappetizing gumminess in his own luxurious bathwater; he is also, to all appearances, miserable. It is hard to say whether the adoration of his admirers or the revulsion of a large and g...

L.A. Material is an independent news organization aimed at filling some holes in the Los Angeles news landscape and making that fascinating, fragmented city more legible. You can learn more, and subscribe, at lamaterial.com. This story originally ran at the site on September...