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.
Before Sunday, Wout van Aert's professional cycling career looked most like a testament to the irresistible force of entropy.
Before Sunday, the Belgian had never won either of the two biggest one-day races on the calendar, suffering untimely crashes and mechanicals, alway...
Finally, after 25 weeks, 1,230 games, 59-some-odd-thousand minutes and 280,000-ish points scored, the NBA's Preseason In Hell is over. Whatever awaits in the NBA Playoffs, the world can at least approach it with the comforting knowledge that it won't have to look at or think...
Feeling blue? Why not try our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Dylan Fugel, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dylan is a German-Burmese sketch comedian, arts educator, and occasional puzzle constructor based in New York. Do not talk to him about Borussia Dortmund or the Knicks; there is a history of high blood pressure in his family.
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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1.
I had not felt this nervous since buying BTS concert tickets. Like many other Southern California residents, I had dutifully signed up for the presale of tickets to the 2028 Olympic Games. These tickets, we were told, would be available exclusively for us. Well, for us and a...
For a little while there, it looked like Rory McIlroy was going to make it easy on himself for once. He held a six-stroke lead after the first two rounds of the 2026 Masters Tournament, granting himself the largest 36-hole lead in the tournament's history. That he built his ...
I went to New Orleans for a wedding last weekend. I used to go there pretty often, for work conventions and lots of Jazzfests, but hadn’t been back since Katrina. I was happy at how much the city, in this small three-day sampling, seemed like its old self. Among the many fam...
The premise of Last One Laughing UK is simple and diabolical: stick a bunch of professionally funny people in a room together for six hours and forbid them from laughing. Crack once and you get a warning, break a second time and you’re out.
The first season was an une...
Donald Trump and his confederacy of douches—a clique that included Marco Rubio, Dana White, and Dan Bongino—showed up ringside at Miami’s Kaseya Center for last night’s UFC card around the same time that America's murderers row of peace negotiators (JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, ...
Were it not for the virtual certainty that he will be cast in a Safdie-directed film at some point, Sid Rosenberg is not a person who should be known by anyone who does not live in or around New York City. He is a type of public figure that every city has, although the fact ...
As the back end of the NBA season mercifully burns to ash, there are still a few oblong aesthetic joys to be found. Thursday night's action featured son-to-father and father-to-son assists, the hilarious spectacle of Josh Hart and Baylor Scheierman going bomb for bomb in Mad...
The only interview that the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli lists on his website is titled Filmmaker gets shot during interview, in which Borgli—you guessed it—gets shot during an interview. The short film opens with Borgli and his interviewer, standing against the idyllic horiz...
Remember the viral image that appears normal at first glance, but upon closer inspection, you cannot actually identify a single object in it? See how itchy your brain feels:
Relatedly, these were the starting lineups for Pacers-Nets on Thursday, April 9, 2026:
My son is a junior. Junior year is the Oh Shit year of high school, as in, Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take the SAT. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take it again if I score anywhere below 1580. Oh shit, AP Calc is kicking my ass right now. There are plenty more oh shits where tha...
Spaceflight is a lot like airplane travel in that the vast, vast majority of incidents happen on takeoff or landing. More things are happening; more things can go wrong. On liftoff and reentry, specifically, the pressure and heat are a crucible in which the flightworthiness of a spacecraft is violently tested. It's important to remember that this is why these preliminary Artemis missions exist: they are flight tests. But tonight's Earth return for Artemis II will be especially squeaky bum time, given what happened to Artemis I's heat shield.
After the uncrewed Artemis I splashed down safely in December 2022, NASA was surprised to discover significant damage to its heat shield, with big chunks missing:
It is a degrading experience to try to purchase tickets to a hugely anticipated event, and nothing fits that description better than the World Cup. So you can imagine why fans who successfully navigated the labyrinth of presale codes and lotteries and came out of it with a p...
Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job there are like a hundred thousand would-be wri...
Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season...
When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a "Land of Many Uses." This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service's management of the forestland covering over a third of the United ...
Complaints that men’s tennis is too fast go back further than I do. “Aces, Aces…men’s tennis too fast for its own good,” reads the headline to a 1992 Associated Press story that, to help make its point, begins with a quote from Casablanca. “Well, you just have to guess where...
The San Francisco Giants shut out the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-0, Wednesday night, for their second consecutive shutout victory and first home series win of the season. The Giants are 5-8 and presently in last place in what is shaping up to be a tough NL West—yes, behind eve...
By now, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold has established her beat as doggedly reporting on her own humiliation. This is someone who excels not just at taking an L, but at putting all of her Ls in a big pile and showing them off to whoever happens to be nearby.
Reingold's...
Welcome toListening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
We are a quarter of the way through 2026. Time is just flying by while we all wait to see if global catastrophe will befall us. Fun stuff. So obviously what we all really need is a soundtrack.
What can be said about the year in music after just three months? There's a lot of anxiety, but also a clear desire to free oneself from said anxiety. There seems to be conscious attempt by many to make "end times" music, which sometimes means dwelling in the abyss of the soul, and other times means partying till the party's over, oops, out of time. The human experience contains multitudes.
This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome David Roth back to the show. Roth knows more about men's college basketball than either Harry or I, but more importantly, he has equally strong opinions about draft prospects. I mean that in both the specific and general senses. We all have guys we like, as well as various archetypes that remain permanently tantalizing.
If you could dig up my Google Maps history from Fall 2022, you would find that I had repeatedly searched for how to get from Columbia University to the American Dream mall by public transportation. Located in East Rutherford, N.J., American Dream is the second-largest mall i...
The final week of the NBA's regular season is here, and with scant meaningful basketball on the horizon, it's time to debate various NBA awards. Will Victor Wembanyama's narrative momentum help him overtake the obviously correct MVP choice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? Will Karl...
In the midst of yet another apocalyptic news cycle, nothing lifts my spirits more than a good old fashioned sex scandal. And what’s this? It appears that Patriots coach Mike Vrabel, who once told the world he’d cut off his own penis to win a Super Bowl, has decided to make g...
The thing that has most consistently awed me as I've plunged into Brazilian funk is just how deep the genre is. In its earliest days, funk really was just about as simple as one particular rhythmic sample laid atop existing dancy hits. But the genre's explosion since then ha...
Where its harsh, cold plains stretch toward the Uruguay River, the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is blanketed by the pampas, expansive fields at odds with the sandy beaches and verdant mountains typically associated with Brazil. In fact, Rio Grande do Sul...
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, Ray answers a pair of questions on parent peer pressure.
