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...

There's probably no reason for the World Cup third-place match to exist. Unlike the Olympics, when a coveted bronze medal is at stake, third place at the World Cup doesn't offer much to teams. By and large, these matches tend to involve mentally checked-out players mainly co...

MULHOUSE, France — Stage 12 of the 2026 Tour de France was supposed to be boring. Maybe it would have been were it not for Quinn Simmons, who did what he does best and made the peloton quake with a thumping attack. The American champion seized the initiative with 35 kilomete...

On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian na...

James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade. 

The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists.

Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled "Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities." The piece went into detail about the owner's fetish for keeping tabs on many of the Garden's famous visitors.

There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate, that...

The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is famously good at parenting. In the leaf litter of forests around the United Kingdom, the beetles scurry around in search of the small carcasses of mice and birds. Once the beetles find a suitable corpse, they get to work. First ...

Here's how we got on this. Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub. He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts.

Giri Nathan

The only movie I've ever walked out of was Kazaam. If I remember correctly, I told my mom I had to go pee and then after that we simply decided not to go back inside. I think even at that age I clocked it as irredeemable. The angriest I've ever been at a movie while sitting in a theater was Rise of Skywalker. I left with plumes of steam coming out of my ears.

Like every previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories. The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage success of the African teams, and most memorably ...

It is the policy of Defector that co-owners who are on vacation should, when on vacation, try their best to be on vacation. There are complicating factors to this simple-sounding rule—it is both easy and tempting to pop into Slack during lulls or just out of habit, and that ...

The Milwaukee Bucks are going to have a hilarious roster next season. Tyler Herro! Myles Turner! Kevin Porter Jr.! Caris LeVert! Kyle fuckin' Kuzma! To assemble this Jaywalkers' Row of contributors, while also affording all of the non-corporeal essence of Damian Lillard that...

Yes, posting a bunch of high-quality photos of fans taken right after their team lost a big game is a bit like shooting cod in a barrel, but I think you'll agree that there is something about crestfallen England fans that makes them particularly striking. I mean, just look at the before and after of the poor lad at the top of this post. Is that not the agony of being a sports fan, perfectly distilled into two images?

This is what getting your soul snatched by Lionel Messi after 30 minutes of cowardly defending does to a country.