I suppose that if I were to complain about how NASA is making available the bulk of the photography captured by Artemis astronauts, NASA would tell me to go to the Moon and get my own pics, if I think I could do it better. But the fact remains that they're just dumping these...
Simply observing the regular season would have given you a heads-up that Avalanche-Wild in the second round would make a spine-tingling playoff series. But how could anyone have imagined what transpired in Game 1? A night that started like a disappointing Avs blowout quickly...
Don’t be shy! Solve our Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a research scientist and crossword constructor in the Bay Area. She is also a co-director of Westwords, a crossword tournament taking place in Berkeley, Calif., and online on Sunday, June 14.
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.
In a hypothetical where one person could be an entire group of guys, and in this hypothetical I were the collective and entire Tampa Bay Lightning, after that Game 7 I would order the team bus to be driven to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge—there are closer bridges to the arena i...
It has been noted that the Montreal Canadiens won Game 7 of their series with the Tampa Bay Lightning on Sunday night with a Stanley Cup Playoff record-low nine shots on goal. This is clearly not true. It was eight. It can only be nine if we are defining "on" as "behind...
With a little under 10 minutes left in his team's Game 7 romp against the Orlando Magic, Cade Cunningham surveyed the floor. Like a wounded animal making a violent lurch, the exhausted Magic defense chose to attack, springing a double-team. Cunningham calmly beckoned forth J...
"I’ve been trying to avoid writing about Vargas in this space," Baseball Prospectus fantasy baseball writer Michael Waterloo wrote last week. "He’s 34 years old, and the vast majority of fantasy players have never heard of him before the last two weeks. We have a nearly...
We have shared with you the ongoing travails of such baseball meh factories as the Mets, Phillies, Angels, Red Sox, and Nationals, but as in the new-style NBA, where if you're not winning, you can at least convince yourselves that you're winning back...
We can presume by now that every Philadelphia 76er and Flyer who wants to do so has mouthed the empty sports platitude, "Nobody believed in us." It's just what you say, and more to the point it's what you say when you've given no indication that anybody should beli...
"If we were in Serbia, we'd all get fired," Nikola Jokic said Thursday night, shortly after his Denver Nuggets lost their first-round playoff series in six games to the Minnesota Timberwolves, who were missing their best player, another starter, and also a third guy who had ...
Obviously, going to print with piddly retail squabbles is the stuff of hacks. But I'm hacky enough, and still stunned enough by the upselling tactics, that I just gotta share.
I’ve previously noted that some power people here at Defector have occasionally suggested I try t...
One walk-off win can cure you of any emotional or intellectual ailment. The smack of the bat, the moment of anticipation as you wait to see if all you've wished for could come true, and the immediate, deafening roar of the crowd all inject you with a hope and belief that buo...
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have two home office cleanup situations and a delightful bird-related request.
Selene asks:
I work from home at a computer job and am a hobbyist musician. My partner, who lives with me,...
Fourteen years. My wife and I were proud minivan owners for 14 years until this month. Once you have three children, practicality takes immediate priority over self-image, so I was never fundamentally against owning a minivan. I was never like, “Oh my God, they’ll take away ...
Earlier this week, the Defector staff was chatting about Joel Embiid. Watching him give the business to the Boston Celtics in Game 5 of that series, with a vintage 33 points in a 113-97 road win for the 76ers, had been fun and surprisingly ... stirring? Not just because it c...
Morbid curiosity is not normally a healthy reason to commit to a form of entertainment, but also you don't necessarily have a say in the matter. Sometimes the morbid part just jumps in front of your face, grabs your eyelids, yanks them down and then snaps them back up like a...
There is an understandable tendency to make Oilers losses about the Oilers rather than about the team that beat them. After being eliminated by the Anaheim Ducks 5-2 in Game 6 on Thursday, Connor McDavid put a damper on the rhetorical appeal of that angle by summing up Edmon...
New York Knicks center Mitchell Robinson is an emotional poster. The big man often posts about his romantic woes, dissatisfaction with his role on the team, and truck. He posts across multiple social media platforms, even Facebook, despite being 28 years old. He posts with s...
The figure skater who said that Canadian ice dancer Nikolaj Sørensen sexually assaulted her—leading to Sørensen's ban from the sport, and his former partner (and current girlfriend) teaming up with a new skater, with whom she won Olympic gold—is speaking publicly for the fir...
Sometimes it's good to get back to basics. We have been enjoying a nice run of guests recently, and have produced some decently delightful episodes as a result. But at its heart, this podcast is about two middle-aged men honking at each other about sports and other things, a...
Converts can often seem like the only really religious people around. They tend to take their faith up, whatever it may be, with enthusiasm and vigor and, most importantly, without embarrassment; the cliché of the "zealotry of the convert" is well known even beyond the confi...
This Mammoth–Golden Knights first-round series has looked about as even as they come, but it's been anything but a stalemate. With one experienced team filled with established superstars (Vegas) and one hungry newcomer that's still finding its full potential (Utah)—plus the ...
When LIV Golf launched in 2022, many were skeptical that there was a viable commercial lane for a new professional golf tour, even if it was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's seemingly bottomless Public Investment Fund and driven by the definitely bottomless cynicism of contempor...
If you paid any attention to the NBA after the calendar flipped to 2026, you were inundated with feverish debates about how to solve the supposedly existential crisis facing the league: tanking. With a strong 2026 draft class awaiting them, the worst 10 teams in the league a...
There is nothing about the Montreal Canadiens in their current iteration that causes a person to stop thinking about the team when it was the league's vibranium standard, which was nearly five decades ago. These Canadiens have always seemed somehow not it, whatever the "it" ...
Donald Trump has a hang-up about Pluto. As far back as 2019, his appointed NASA administrator was making noise about reclassifying it as a planet, a status it lost when in 2006 the International Astronomical Union created a new system of nomenclature for all those weird and ...
The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw...
The Los Angeles Angels, to the extent they are discussed at all, have mostly been shamed for having the last two best players in the game over the past decade and doing nothing of substance with either. This has in large part been because they have produced, acquired, and re...
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, Albert offers advice on how to handle one of your kids complaining about the other.
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