In February of  2025, New York State correctional staff began an illegal work stoppage to challenge recent changes to the state’s carceral system. Their primary objective was to force the repeal of the Humane Alternatives to Longterm Solitary Confinement Act (also known...

It was not so long ago that the return of baseball had me in my feelings in a positive way. Kelsey McKinney and I talked about it on the podcast just two weeks ago, but while the bump in my emotional wellbeing that accompanied the mere presence of baseball games on my televi...

As the Warriors bathed in the luminous joy of ending the Los Angeles Clippers' cursed season, Golden State head coach Steve Kerr offered five perfect words. "For one night," he grinned, "we're us." The 10th-seeded Warriors truly were their old selves, and not in the pejorati...

One cannot simply leave behind a life of crime. Your body craves the adrenaline for years afterward. It begs for it. The desire for just one more job, one more hit, one more simple robbery will never really go away, because a normal life is just so boring when compared with ...

The New York Islanders took a moment during their final game of the season to promote a fundraiser for a former NYPD sergeant who was recently convicted of manslaughter. Yeah, sounds about right. During Tuesday's 2-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, the Islanders' jumbotron...

The first thing you notice about the right side of the Stanley Cup playoff map is the almost complete absence of continuity—that is, if you're the sort of person who nerds out on that sort of thing, in which case you've got deeper personality flaws than we are equipped to ta...

For the second straight year, Harry and I have assembled a mega-sized playoff preview podcast. Just like last year, it features shortish interviews with people we like who follow as many of the teams in the playoffs and play-in as possible. Unlike last year, it was way too long to cram into one episode, let alone two. So this year, we bring you previews of the Western Conference, the Eastern Conference, and the Denver Nuggets.

In the West, we brought on:

• Tyler Parker to talk Oklahoma City Thunder
• Eamon Whalen to talk Minnesota Timberwolves
• Billy Haisley's brother to talk Los Angeles Lakers
• Isaac Chotiner to talk Houston Rockets
• Sean Highkin to talk Portland Trail Blazers

Grief has no expiration date, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.

Twenty-one years ago this summer, Steve Cornejo was shot in the back and died in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Fairfax, Va. Cornejo was unarmed. Brandon Gotwalt, who shot him in the back, initially told police he wasn't on the scene, then claimed self-defense, then admitted to flushing the spent shell and his shirt down the toilet, then admitted to carrying an illegally concealed .38 caliber handgun, then said the shooting was accidental. The shooter was never arrested or charged with any crimes. 

“They treated him like, ‘Oh, just another dead Latino,’” said Isabelle Janus-Clark, Cornejo’s high school classmate and childhood friend. “The police just acted like he wasn’t worth the trouble. He was worth the trouble.”

It's a tough task to make anyone reading this blog to feel bad for the reigning Premier League champions, a team still solidly in contention for Champions League qualification for next season, and an organization that spent a fortune, perhaps badly, this past summer. (This t...

I don't remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nic...

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, Chris answers questions on how to prepare for outings with a baby or toddler.

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Pilot is one of those jobs with a rarefied air around it. I see the uniform, and I immediately think That person knows and can do things that I cannot. If you've ever seen Catch Me If You Can, that power is a key plot point, as nobody questions con man Leonardo DiCaprio's authority as long as he looks like he can fly an airplane.

But pilots are people, too. They eat, and they sleep, and they follow sports just like us. Here's proof:

https://bsky.app/profile/acarsdrama.bsky.social/post/3mfagkehvrb2x

I like to think of myself as quite the optimist, which explains a career-long, pan-sport fascination with prospects, prodigies, and up-and-comers of all sorts. The future of every sport is out there materializing, in the form of legions of children rising to displace and cas...

I had already done the hard part that night: getting my kids to sleep. It was dark now, May 20, 2022, one of the last cool evenings before summer hit central Indiana. I told my wife I was going on a walk, put in my earbuds, and set out. Tomorrow was trash day, which mea...

Nothing is potentially as pathetic as an old-guy tantrum, and yet nothing is so potentially entertaining as an old-guy tantrum when the old guy isn't worried about his gig. Enter Rick Bowness, the head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets and someone whose face would be on the...

On Tuesday, the Athletic reported that NJ Transit plans on hiking up the price of return tickets to New York Penn Station from World Cup games at the New York New Jersey stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., to more than $100, an approximately eight-fold increase from the ordina...

NFL reporter Dianna Russini resigned from The Athletic on Tuesday, a week after the New York Post published photos of her and New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel lounging and holding hands (with interlocked fingers!) at a lovely Sedona resort. Russini denied that there wa...

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 AI, Heather Cox Richardson, knives, and more.

Your letters:

Bryan:

When I survey energy markets—that is, when I gaze through binoculars at the gas station sign I can read from my home as long as there isn’t a big truck in the intersection—I see the disruptive effects of supply shocks. Pain at the pump follows from mismanaged supply chain risk. A parallel trend exists in…

With just under two months until the start of the 2026 World Cup, it seems that FIFA executives have finally looked up at the horizon, seen the looming shitstorm, and are now scrambling to head it off. The Athletic reported on Tuesday that top FIFA heads have sought to convi...

With the eighth pick of the WNBA Draft on Monday, the Golden State Valkyries took a big, fun swing by selecting LSU guard Flau'jae Johnson. Though she was inconsistent in her senior campaign at LSU, Johnson preceded that with three standout seasons for the Tigers, and she ha...

Time began tormenting me in March of last year. I had been traveling for weeks to promote my book about gossip, a kind of capstone to the fastest-paced era of my life. All of it—the podcast we made, the fervent response it received, the life of deadlines, and the pressure an...

"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," said no blogger ever. But we're not made entirely out of mud and coal. With the 16 NHL playoff teams officially set, if not yet the exact matchups, I'd like to offer in the meantime a kind of anti–playoff preview, where we cover every team whose season is over. I'll say one nice thing and one mean thing about each. We'll start at the middle of the standings and descend from there.

Washington Capitals

A Nice Thing: In what might be his final NHL season, 40-year-old Alex Ovechkin leads the team yet again with 32 goals. Even if he's just running up the score on Gretzky now, everyone who saw Ovi notch 900 and beyond in person this year is thankful for the memory.

Everyone gather 'round for a beef update. The beef update is this: Chappell Roan and Jorginho are no longer having one.

According to Jorginho, that is. The Flamengo midfielder, who started this whole beef cycle several weeks ago with an Instagram post, has now declared it finished with yet another Instagram post. After accusing one of Roan's security guards of being rude and mean to his 11-year-old daughter at a hotel in São Paulo, the soccer star is now ready to chalk the whole thing up as a misunderstanding.

"I made my initial statement in the heat of the moment, after hearing that my child and wife had been approached by an adult male security guard in an intimidating way," said Jorginho in his statement. "Since then, I have become aware of new information that has changed my understanding of parts of what happened."

Basketball has been a key part of my life since I was a little kid, both as entertainment and, very briefly, a possible career. I played school and club ball and participated in numerous expensive training camps knowing that my parents, both of whom played in high school, fe...

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted ...

Sea, trees, and hills make Monte Carlo the prettiest stop on the tennis tour, but for Sunday's championship, it did its best to dull itself. The singles final featured gray sky, chilly air, and gusts tossing the ball around unpredictably. It was sure to be a rough outing at ...

I like to think that I am both a professional at what I do and a sports fan still not too jaded to have lost my irrational passions. I'm lucky enough to work at Defector, where I am free to exercise both of those two sides of myself, which is why I can openly throw my bias i...

The Milwaukee Bucks fired Doc Rivers on Monday. What a terrible time they have all had. The Bucks failed to advance out of the first round of the playoffs in two previous tries under Rivers; this season, beset by injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo and showing that characteris...

Despite threats—by an editor who shall go unnamed, but who does not have my best interests in mind—to ship me off to Aintree Racecourse to cover the event in person, I am once again conducting an ethnography of English horse race attendees from the safe remove of Getty Images. By year three, one begins to pick up patterns, such as the fact that the atmosphere at the Grand National is not only perpetually soused but also, as is true for much of England, perpetually damp. This year's edition emphasizes the latter point, focusing on attempts to use and/or manufacture an umbrella to stay warm and dry. You will be pleased to hear that dampness is not enough to deter attendees from sitting upon the pavement.