FeedCity: Defector

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31 May 16:57 • Tom Ley

Fernando Tatis Jr. Finally Hit A Damn Homer

Baseball is the only sport that regularly produces the following thought in my head: Does everyone who is good at baseball actually kind of suck at baseball? The existence of Shohei Ohtani makes it impossible to ever answer with a definitive "yes," but the question lingers s...

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31 May 16:30 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Playing A Baseball Simulator Made Me A Fanatic Again

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I really loved attending games. Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Miami came at the old Dolphins/Marlins stadium, a truly horrible place to watch any sporting event, but also one tha...

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31 May 14:30 • Tom Ley

There’s No Hiding From The Spurs

Viewed strictly within the context of the Western Conference Finals, there was nothing all that shocking about the San Antonio Spurs' 111-103 road victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 7. That doesn't make what happened on Saturday night feel any less destabilizing....

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31 May 14:30 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Well, That Stunk

By their very nature, cup finals do not necessarily make for exciting matches. For every 2022 World Cup final, there are 15 2019 Champions League finals. That does not excuse what happened on Saturday in Budapest, though. Over 120 minutes, Arsenal forced Paris Saint-Germain ...

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29 May 18:21 • Joshua Kendall

“Awfulness For Decades”: A Short History Of Trump And Doonesbury

The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now. In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentiall...

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29 May 17:57 • Abigail Segel

The Denver Summit May Not Be Good, But They Sure Are Fun

There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course, are they any good? It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Sin...

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29 May 17:27 • Defector Staff

There Is A Whole World In ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.’

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives litt...

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29 May 16:42 • Kathryn Xu

How I Became An Itinerant Cat Tutor

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a t...

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29 May 16:42 • Billy Haisley

Barcelona Wins The Crown But Loses The Queen

This past Saturday, Barcelona Femení met OL Lyonnes in the Champions League final and crushed them by a score of 4-0. The scoreline was a little misleading, but only a little. On one hand, the first half of the match tilted heavily in Lyon's favor. The French team put their ...

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29 May 16:42 • Ray Ratto

The Tragedy Of Appreciating SOBs Too Late

The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of ...

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29 May 16:42 • Tom Ley

Bari Weiss Hires Credulous Dope To Run ’60 Minutes’

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is making big moves. This week, she declined to renew the contract of 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on the hellish conditions at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was pulled off the ai...

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29 May 14:42 • Sabrina Imbler

The Long, Sad, And Totally Fucked-Up Tale Of Timmy The Whale’s Trip To Germany

When the dead body of Timmy the humpback whale beached itself last week off the shores of the Danish island of Anholt, it was only a matter of time before Timmy would risk of the fate that befalls many a beached whale:

https://twitter.com/achillghost/status/2058958519747887516

The residents of Anholt, per the BBC, have watched Timmy slowly balloon in size as its guts and stomach begin to decompose. Timmy's body, skin taut and distended by gases, now lolls around a sandbank a short distance from the beach and drifting in the shallow waves. As one German television channel aired a livestream of its dead body, the channel included the number of a suicide hotline.

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29 May 14:42 • Albert Burneko

Spurs Deliver An Ass-Kicking And Force Game 7

With less than three minutes to play in the first half of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant drove past Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and threw down a huge, nasty, two-handed dunk, pushing the Spurs' lead to 12 and sending the home crow...

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28 May 20:45 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Don’t Think Too Hard About The New York Liberty

The most maddening moments the New York Liberty have to offer are not the bad ones—not the turnovers, the biffed layups, the “just vibes” possessions on offense—but the moments here and there when things click and the whole team starts to play well. Those flashes of competen...

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28 May 20:27 • David Roth

The Lost City Of Bing Bong, With David Grann

When we first had New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author David Grann on the podcast back in 2023, Drew and I mostly asked him the sort of things that we would ask one of our heroes when he happened to be out there promoting a new book. We had a good conversation abou...

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28 May 17:33 • Giri Nathan

Jannik Sinner Gets Too Close To The Sun, Falls Early In French Open

Going into Roland-Garros, there was clear consensus: The greatest threat to Jannik Sinner was the Sun itself. It's the type of snappy one-liner that gets slung on the TV broadcast a dozen times a day, but it wound up prescient as the No. 1 seed melted down Thursday in a stup...

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28 May 17:18 • Chris Thompson

James Wood Will Mightily Thwap The Baseball In Whichever Direction He Pleases

James Wood is a pretty good leadoff hitter. Rookie Nationals manager Blake Butera, a disturbingly young fellow who looks like he should be one of the nine guys in this video, moved Wood to the top of Washington's lineup back in the spring, gradually swapping the places of Wo...

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28 May 16:45 • David Roth

The New York Jets Will Now Try Being “AI-First”

The New York Jets have been pretty uniformly terrible on the field under the ownership of Woody Johnson, but the organization has lately been recognized as an innovative and industry-leading presence in integrating video game rankings and loutish patrician antics into its fr...

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28 May 16:45 • Dave McKenna

After 40 Years, The Guys Who Made ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ Are Almost Famous

Don’t tell Jeff Krulik he’s famous, especially if anybody's around. “I’ll be with somebody and they’ll say to somebody, ‘Hey, this is the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot!” Krulik said. “And I know what’s coming next: A blank stare." "It's humbling," said Krulik, who r...

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28 May 16:45 • Ray Ratto

The Canadiens Have A Weird Fetish For Not Shooting The Puck And They’re Making It Everybody’s Problem

The Montreal Canadiens have chosen an odd and ill-advised moment to test out a new, advanced, and almost transcendental hockey analytics notion. Either that, or the Carolina Hurricanes are putting together the first five-game sweep in history. Either way, we're getting some...

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28 May 14:45 • James Webster

‘The Vivisectors’ Is A Brilliant Novel In Any Reality

The specifics are a little difficult to pin down, but that’s true of most things surrounding novelist, filmmaker, and playwright Missouri Williams. Here are the facts I’ve been able to piece together: At some point in her young adulthood, Williams began to have seizures. In ...

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28 May 14:45 • Samer Kalaf

Students For Trump Co-Founder Arrested On Domestic Violence Charges, Allegedly Yelled “Do You Want To Die Today?”

Ryan Fournier, the co-founder and chairman of the group Students for Trump, was arrested early Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., after he allegedly assaulted and threatened a woman, according to documents obtained by Defector. The Metropolitan Police Department charged Fournier with simple assault and attempted threats to do bodily harm. According to the affidavit, the…

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27 May 18:42 • Giri Nathan

How Do I Talk About Parenting If My Baby Has Been Pretty Chill So Far?

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where each week a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on family life. Have a question, email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Giri answers a question about how to talk with other parents about having an easier than expected experience raising a baby.

Frank:

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27 May 17:33 • Patrick Redford

Getting Kicked Out Of The Comedian Run, With Gavin Matts

This week on the show, we were thrilled to be joined by the comedian and actor Gavin Matts. You may know him from his special, Progression, or his work on the TV series Hacks or Ramy, though we know him primarily as a ball-knower and British Columbian of distinction. We had a long, fun conversation about Gavin's love for the New York Knicks, the relocation of the Vancouver Grizzlies that forced him into Roninhood, how he got kicked out of the NYC comedian run (which previous NBR guest Devon Walker talked about in January), his scouting report on Ramy Youssef's game, and how he tried to get into the White Men Can't Jump remake. It was a fun one!

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

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27 May 17:09 • Sabrina Imbler

And They Were Tomb Mates!

There comes a time in every skeleton's death when, upon their being discovered in a grave hugging another skeleton, modern people start foaming at the mouth guessing at what that relationship might have been. This is understandable and quite defensible from my perspective as...

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27 May 17:09 • Tom Ley

Enough With This Stupid Camera Angle

A terrible thing keeps happening to me. About three hours before the start of each game of the Western Conference Finals, I start to enter the "pumped and jacked zone." That's when I get pumped and jacked for the game, and plan my evening around my excitement to watch it. An...

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27 May 17:09 • Lauren Theisen

That Was Embarrassing

I know that every Presidents' Trophy winner has lost in the playoffs before the Cup Final in each of the last 13 seasons, and that the Colorado Avalanche advancing even this far made them more successful than your average No. 1 seed. I get that Cale Makar was too injured to ...

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27 May 17:09 • Ray Ratto

Vegas Is Built For Springtime

The Vegas Golden Knights are a grudgingly acquired taste with one of the gristliest coaches in modern North American sport, but when they serve the meal as they did Tuesday night, you're eating it because the alternative is leaving hungry. Sweeping the battered Colorado Aval...

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27 May 15:09 • Giri Nathan

What Is This Alien Feeling Of Watching The Knicks Without Pain?

Every spring, as the flowers open and the days warm, Knicks merchandise bursts out of closets in New York City. Hats, T-shirts, and jackets adorn eager New Yorkers across the five boroughs. I wish I were a mature enough person to handle this particular bandwagoning with grac...

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27 May 15:09 • Chris Thompson

The Thunder Have Numbers

The Oklahoma City Thunder have options. Their best player got off to a rough start in Game 5. Before scoring a single point Tuesday night, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander committed three live-ball turnovers and a shooting foul, leading to seven points for the visiting San Antonio Sp...