FeedCity: Defector

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15 Jun 21:45 • Dave McKenna

UFC’s White House Fight Night May Have Been An Unforgivable Folly, But At Least It Was Violent And Offensive

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday weekend didn’t all go well for him, at home or abroad. His name finally got pulled off the Kennedy Center early Saturday, after lots of effort to halt and obscure the removal. And word got out that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that the pr...

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15 Jun 20:36 • Ray Ratto

Cape Verde Defeats Spain, 0-0

This was the moment when Gianni Infantino, the grubby little cash slag who runs FIFA, could have made himself a noble and even admirable human being in the eyes of a world that absolutely knows he would lick an alley clean for 10 bucks. And of course, he passed on it because...

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15 Jun 20:15 • Israel Daramola

There’s No Place Like New York City

It's hard to explain what it's been like walking around New York City over the past two weeks. Even if the Knicks don't specifically come up, the spirits are high. Knicks gear and colors are everywhere, the people are smiling, the mayor is Muslim, the bagels are Jewish, etc....

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15 Jun 18:18 • Kathryn Xu

Lewis Hamilton Is Still Lewis Hamilton

It is easy to get lost in the scope of things when it comes to Sir Lewis Hamilton. There are the championships (seven, depending on how you count) and the race wins (106) and the longevity (19 years and counting), and his victory at the 2026 Barcelona Grand Prix this Sunday ...

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15 Jun 18:03 • Patrick Redford

FIFA’s Hydration Breaks Break The Essence Of The Game

Soccer is all about momentum. The distinguishing aspect of its competitive structure is that it's unsegmented, with a simple, 15-minute halftime bisecting two 45-minute blocks. The neophyte might see a goalless desert stippled with oases distributed seemingly at random and o...

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15 Jun 17:45 • Albert Burneko

Whither Wemby?

Victor Wembanyama is maybe just kind of a corny guy. I think we are all going to have to get accustomed to that. His taste in reading material could scarcely be more embarrassing shy of, like, pickup-artist instruction manuals. He seems to go out of his way to cultivate a pu...

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15 Jun 17:27 • Lauren Theisen

Brandon Bussi Filled The Hurricanes’ Last Hole

The story of the 2026 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes is that of a team that made a lot of smart decisions over a period of many years and was eventually rewarded. Sebastian Aho, drafted in the second round in 2015, has been the foundational forward ever since they ...

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15 Jun 17:00 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

Why Star YouTube Influencer Ingrid Nilsen Quit Her Job

Despite its apparent ubiquity, the career of "online influencer" is so young that the first generation of people to use that title are not only still working, but still young.

Ingrid Nilsen was one of the very first beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, and the work she did in her late teens and early 20s created the blueprint for what the industry has become today. A few of her highlights: She was the first online creator to work with CoverGirl and she interviewed President Obama. Her coming out video in 2015 went mega viral, and she invented Vlogmas, which is a daily vlogging challenge still used by thousands of creators every December.

She had more than three million YouTube subscribers, and in 2020, she quit.

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15 Jun 16:39 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Curacao Will Never Forget The One In 7-1

The expanded field at the 2026 World Cup is, from a competitive standpoint, a disaster. Upping the team count from 32 to 48 has robbed the best part of any World Cup, the group stage, of its famous intensity and tension. Even an extra round of knockout games won't salvage things, given that eight third-place teams will qualify for that, and there surely won't be eight good third-place teams. The expansion of the field is a blatant money grab by FIFA, and it's a real disappointment to see the way that the World Cup has been warped by greed.

Now, try telling that to Curacao, which scored its first-ever World Cup goal in its first-ever World Cup match against none other than Germany. Try telling that team, and that fanbase, that this is all terrible and bad for the sport:

https://youtu.be/taI5dp_0C0Y?si=aLEEOOvKbRtzkl2S&t=105

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15 Jun 15:51 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, June 15: I Need Some Space

Aren’t you happy to see our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Patrick Maher, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Patrick is a software engineer and sporadic crossword constructor who lives in Manhattan. His hobbies include having two young childr...

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15 Jun 13:48 • Ray Ratto

The Hurricanes’ Dominance Required Years Of Disappointment

For a team that was known for playing yesterday's hockey for a decade and being punished regularly for it, the Carolina Hurricanes played a lot like a historically elite team. You just didn't get to see a lot of it because they played so few games, which is proof if proof we...

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14 Jun 16:27 • Ray Ratto

The USMNT Won With Flair. Can It Win A Grind?

There were a number of intriguing discoveries to be made from the first round of matches in Group D of the World Cup, or as it is coming to be known, the Group Of Deaf. Such was the torrent of nearly hysterical praise directed at the United States team after its nearly ritua...

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14 Jun 16:27 • Barry Petchesky

Scenes From The Street After A Knicks Title

Days of humidity had finally broken with a thunderstorm the night before. Brazilians were all over midtown, getting ready for their World Cup game. Puerto Rican and Pride flags were everywhere. "Knicks in five" was no longer a shibboleth or even a prediction; it was now the ...

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14 Jun 14:24 • Ray Ratto

It Won’t Get Better Than This

Gotham's true heroes, its sanitation brigades, are still sweeping up the dazed, delirious, and confused bodies from the streets of the city, and the clean-up will take them well into this evening. Then they'll have to do it all over again Thursday after the obligatory semi-v...

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14 Jun 14:24 • Barry Petchesky

Jalen Brunson Is New York’s Exorcist

With a 94-90 win in Game 5, yet another doughty comeback and superlative Jalen Brunson takeover, the New York Knicks are NBA Champions. This is an unsettling and unusual thing to say, because they are the New York Knicks. Knicks fandom has, historically, been about fe...

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12 Jun 18:09 • Giri Nathan

It’s Hard To Find The Feel-Good Angle Of Alexander Zverev

This past Sunday, Alexander Zverev won his first major title. On the surface, the 29-year-old's Roland-Garros victory is the story of a player who, after roughly a decade of high expectations, accomplished the signature feat in his sport while benefiting from injuries and ea...

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12 Jun 17:42 • Israel Daramola

Texas Tech Releases Propaganda Film On Brendan Sorsby’s Behalf

After a Texas court granted Brendan Sorsby an injunction against the NCAA's suspension of his eligibility due to his gambling activity, the reaction inside and outside of college sports was intense. At Texas Tech, they hear you and they're listening. That's why the school as...

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12 Jun 17:18 • Barry Petchesky

John Tortorella Stands Behind Carter Hart As Hart Fails To Stand In Front Of Four Goals Per Game

There are very few people on Earth who want to see Carter Hart in net for Vegas. Most of them are Golden Knights fans, but no one cares what they think because they are Golden Knights fans. One of them is John Tortorella, who has displayed a deep and occasionally baffling le...

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12 Jun 17:00 • Kelsey McKinney

Observing And Breathing At The Calder Gardens

Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. T...

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12 Jun 17:00 • Drew Magary

It’s Time To Begin Safeguarding The Future Against Our Intelligent Teddy Bear

[STEPS OUT ONTO THE STAGE WITH A WIRELESS MICROPHONE ATTACHED TO MY CHEEK]

Meet Andre. Andre is a teddy bear, but one with a secret. Would you like to tell everyone your secret, Andre?

[SQUEEZES THE BEAR]

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12 Jun 16:30 • Kathryn Xu

Formula 1 Stewards After Massive Mishap Mangles Monaco: Oopsie Daisy!

On Sunday in Monaco, Alpine's Pierre Gasly received pit-lane speed penalties totaling 10 seconds, which demoted him down to P7; on Thursday, Formula 1 reporter Chris Medland reported that Alpine's appeal for a review of those penalties had been deemed admissible. From that p...

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12 Jun 16:09 • Luis Paez-Pumar

South Korea’s Ballers Stole The Show

One thing that's always fun at a World Cup is a good old-fashioned clash of styles. With so many different teams, and so many different managers and tactics and players, no two sides play quite alike, and so a central tension of any match becomes the stylistic conflict. Imag...

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12 Jun 16:09 • Giri Nathan

The Knicks’ Finals Run Has Even Made Print Media Hot

Knicks mania is in the air, but how does that affect local businesses beyond the obvious cases, like bars packed out on random weeknights? Beer is a constant, but what about print media? To find out, I stopped by Casa Magazines, a well-loved corner store in the West Village ...

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12 Jun 15:12 • Billy Haisley

Spain Has The Best, Is The Best

It's time for the World Cup. We've been previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here.

As the largest event humanity has ever come up with, it's safe to say that the World Cup is a big deal. In some way or other the tournament connects to literally everything, from politics, to culture, to war, to art, to philosophy, to biology, to economics, and on and on. As such, it can sometimes get overlooked that, on its most fundamental level, the World Cup is just a collection of soccer games. And the simplest explanation of a game of soccer is that the team with the best players usually wins. That is why Spain is the clear favorite. At this World Cup, Spain has the best players.

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12 Jun 13:12 • Ray Ratto

In Unprecedented Development, Carolina Wins Normal Game

Well, it had to happen eventually. We'd been putting it off and pushing it back and wallowing earhole-deep in the adrenaline rush of it all, bouncing from Las Vegas to San Antonio to Raleigh to Manhattan in a poker game in which we'd finally reached the rarefied land of the ...

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11 Jun 19:15 • Giri Nathan

One Euphoric Night In The City Of OG Anunoby

The sounds coming out of me were causing the sleeping baby to stir, so I had to remove myself from the premises. But I had just seen the hand of god steal Game 4 in the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history, giving the New York Knicks a 3-1 series lead, and I was in a city...

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11 Jun 18:03 • David Roth

Guttural Fan Noises And Exceptional Risottos, With Giri Nathan

There are many people who are capable of watching dramatic sporting events in crowded bars and enjoying themselves. You may be one of them, and you have almost certainly seen them out there erupting in celebration at big moments, or just chanting "U-P-S" at a UPS truck becau...

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11 Jun 16:24 • Sabrina Imbler

They’re Making Ötzi The Iceman Show Feet

When I first saw the press release announcing that scientists had harvested yeast from the remains of Ötzi the 5,000-year-old iceman and used it to make a sourdough bread, I admit I was not terribly moved. The announcement smelled like a publicity stunt designed to get Ötzi ...

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11 Jun 15:48 • Lauren Theisen

De’Aaron Fox, What Were You Thinking?

If OG Anunoby's miraculous put-back of Jalen Brunson's long three is the Hand of God, maybe the play before it was the Brain of Squirrel. It was Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, currently finishing up his ninth year in the NBA, who made a pre-rookie mistake that allowed the Knicks ...

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11 Jun 15:48 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

The World Cup’s Most Interesting Newbie Is Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Poker-Playing Manager

The World Cup is great for surfacing fun facts. Here's one that might shock your ears as you watch Bosnia-Herzegovina play its first group-stage game on Friday: The team's coach, Sergej Barbarez, is 54 years old and working his first job as a manager. Also, he was most recen...