Artemis II is headed for the Moon; it quite literally cannot not go to the Moon, now. After a trans-lunar injection burn Thursday evening, there physically is not enough fuel on the spacecraft to do anything but relatively small course corrections. It's on a free-return traj...

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School who also appears as "Ben" in 10:04, and may or may not be the nameless narrator of Transcription? For some, literary stardom is an aphrodisiac. Sex...

One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued...

It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of...

For a population that increasingly spends their time and makes their money in the Arab world, tennis players have had almost nothing to say about Palestine. In that respect, they are like most professional athletes in 2026: silent on even the most obvious injustices, possibl...

The San Antonio Spurs won again Wednesday night, dumping the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco to move a whopping 40 games over .500. The win was their 10th in a row and 15th in 16; they are presently mounting their second 10-game winning streak since the end of January...

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon. This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucina...

It has been 2,500 days, give or take a week, since the San Jose Sharks last played a truly meaningful hockey game. That game was a series-ending 5-1 loss to St. Louis in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, and since then, the Sharks have been the worst team in the league bot...

Levi McCathern, an attorney representing Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua, told The California Post on Wednesday that his client has checked into a rehab center in Malibu. Last month, Nacua was sued by a woman named Madison Atiabi, who says that Nacua bit her and made an anti...

It was about 65 minutes after liftoff, the Integrity spacecraft 800 miles above the Indian Ocean and moving at about 16,000 miles per hour, when the historic words were spoken: "Integrity, Houston, toilet is powered." 

It was a spaceflight milestone. Artemis II, which launched from Florida Wednesday evening, will put four humans around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions ceased in 1972. But the Orion crew vehicle, named Integrity, has something those Apollo astronauts lacked: an onboard toilet. As Orion spends its first day boosting itself to a high-Earth orbit in preparation for its lunar jaunt, it's already farther from the planet than any crewed spacecraft in 54 years. That means its toilet is the most distant toilet in the history of humankind.

In a move that perhaps stems from restlessness or jealousy over the federal government getting all the attention, the state of Florida has called for the NFL to get more racist. James Uthmeier, the state's attorney general, announced on March 25 that he would be sending a le...

There are many ways to frame what I'm about to say, and I'm sure someone funnier and smarter than me could find the perfect way to really maximize the impact of this sentence. I, however, think the bold-faced truth, with no embellishment, is the funniest way to deliver this ...

When Defector decided to get in on the market for parenting advice, there were many questions we had to consider. After all, there is no shortage of content on parenting at the moment: Oscar-winning movies about the prolonged effects of marijuana usage and guerrilla warfare on fatherhood. Oscar-winning movies on the tragedy of Elizabethan-era motherhood…

The WNBA is still a fairly new league in both geologic and relative terms, and so the news that the Connecticut Sun had been sold to the folks who own the Houston Rockets and would move to Texas after this season created minimal stir, despite some ambient stink on the deal. ...

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now.

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Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

C.B. Bucknor has got to be the only person on Earth wishing that Angel Hernandez was still an active major league umpire. Ever since Hernandez abruptly retired in 2024, the search for baseball's new bad-call bogeyman has been on. It seems that the spotlight is settling on Bu...

JAŸ-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he’s been some kind of recluse the past few years, absent from the public imagination—he’s been doing evil billionaire things, laundering the NFL’s post-Kaepernick reputation through the grandiose production of the Super Bowl h...

Tiger Woods was “sweating profusely” and appeared “lethargic and slow” after his crash last weekend, according to an arrest affidavit released Tuesday. The golfer told investigators with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office that he had taken “a few” prescription drugs earlier in the day, and a deputy later found two hydrocodone pills in Woods’s left pocket. Wood was…

In the first of the recent rambling Instagram live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep-work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkwa...

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, guest host Dave McKenna is talking about cowboy hats, music, high-risk eating, and catch phrases.

What an honor this is! Other than initials I have nothing in common with Drew, the legendary Funbag founder and a real man of letters. But now somebody messed up and let me have the keys to his column. I’m reminded of the time the Exxon Valdez was commandeered by Captain Hazelwood. Let’s commence this voyage. 

Your letters:

He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old...

A half-decade ago in the early days of this website, long before ABS or "The Big Dumper," I became obsessed with a very rare and unexciting way to play baseball. Frustrated by the prevalence of the long ball over small ball in MLB, I imagined a different world: one where pla...

Hockey fights always feel a little absurd when their performativeness is laid bare. We know how it works, and why it's done, but crave permission to suspend disbelief. Just give us the smallest fig leaf of interpersonal dislike, and we'll buy it. But a move toward a safer an...

This week on the show, we were joined by Papo2oo4, the New Jersey rapper behind last year's excellent Papaholic, Vol. 1 and, more relevantly, a New Jersey basketball expert par excellence. We talked about Andrei Kirilenko, when Papo briefly started a podcast that was derailed because his co-hosts were only interested in talking about Kanye West, and why Kyle Anderson was the best high school basketball player he's seen. We also talked a little at the top about a harrowing basketball-watching habit I have, and Harry shared a galactic-brained Darryn Peterson take.

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

Any hotshot high schooler who commits to South Carolina is also committing to a kind of amnesia. How many points you scored last game, how old you are, whether you’re a starter or come off the bench, whether you’ve been on this stage before—none of those things seem to matte...

The West Sacramento Athletics are the last winless team in baseball, which is not much of an accomplishment in and of itself. Someone is always the last winless team in baseball, going all the way back to the beginning of baseball and for that matter, winning in general. All...

Among a certain class of politics reporters and pundits, the single most legitimizing thing a Democratic politician can be is "loathed by everyone younger than, browner than, or to the ideological left of James Carville." Safer by far than engaging with a politician's polici...

Rayan Cherki is not the best soccer player in the world. In fact, he's not even a locked-in, sure-fire starter for either of the two teams he currently plays for, Manchester City and France. But though there are certainly several other players who make a bigger, more consist...

The phrase "31-0 run" in basketball might trigger visions of rhapsodic, jogo bonito ball movement, virtuosic shooting, and impregnable defense. The actual 31-0 run achieved by the Toronto Raptors on Sunday looked a little more ordinary than that. If there was anything specta...

Formula 1 has a qualifying problem. This, the FIA acknowledges—that the new power unit regulations have resulted in unfortunate and confusing qualifying laps in which the cars physically cannot go, by some definitions, "as fast as possible." The actual racing, however, is mo...