After a flyout and a strikeout in his first two attempts, Jake Bauers's third time facing Blake Snell in Wednesday's Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider down the middle of the plate for strike one. He took two non-competitiv...

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I had on our two favorite WNBA writers to talk about the Golden State Valkyries' forthcoming WNBA championship. Both Maitreyi Anantharaman, whom you all know from her work here, and Mata Goldberg-Safir, whom you also know from her work here and should know from her work at Rough Notes, know ball and will be covering the series between the Valks and the Atlanta Dream. We spent a solid hour talking about the series and the path the two teams took to get here, but mostly we talked about the Kiah Stokes.

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!

Ross Douthat has a fantasy novel for young-adult readers: The Falcon's Children, the first in what reportedly will be a trilogy from the respectability-conservatism peddler, who left his sinecure as a columnist at the New York Times earlier this year so that he could lower television's aggregate charisma level by 944 percent as a correspondent for Bari Weiss's 60 Minutes. That is virtually all I will ever know about The Falcon's Children, and I beseech you, tender reader, to follow my example. I am here today to talk about fantasy maps.

Here, via Douthat's Substack (where he first published at least some of the text of The Falcon's Children), is the hand-drawn map of his fantasy world:

Hydras, the tiny freshwater invertebrates that resemble tentacular palm trees, are often considered immortal. They fasten themselves to rocks with their sticky foot, stretch out their tube-shaped body, and unfurl the stinging tentacles that halo their mouth to catch prey tha...

It is late August, the waning days of a long summer. Though the oppressive heat still imposes itself on you, the days are shortening noticeably, the faint whisper of a chill in the air perceptible in the stiller moments of deep night. Soon there will be red leaves, sweaters ...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. “Everyone’s a critic” has b...

There are two men running for Senate in Michigan, and one of them sucks. See if you can guess which one based on their official statements about the condition of the Detroit Red Wings, which were solicited by the blog Octopus Thrower. For context, the Red Wings hold the long...

If you’re not following Francis Fukuyama on Instagram, you’re missing out. His posts exemplify a Boomer picaresque aesthetic: the occasional typo in his captions, pictures of electronic parts that he’s fiddling with, a linear algebra textbook, a landscape shot of the Danube,...

Sally Rooney, one of the most popular novelists alive, says she will no longer sell her books in the U.K. In 2025, the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, and in August of that year, Rooney published an op-ed in The Irish Times titled,...

CHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA — For decades, the U.S. Women's National Team stood at the top of the mountain, where the air is thinnest. They defended their position with ferocity. They didn't win every major tournament, but they won most of them, and were contenders in all. Th...

In the grim darkness of the far future, 40,000 years from now, an immortal corpse-Emperor sits atop his Golden Throne on Earth, watching over the trillions upon trillions of human beings scattered across the galaxy. For ten thousand years, the Emperor hasn’t spoken or moved ...

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, Albert answers a question about a child who has become Bible curious.

---

In terms of things you simply do not want to see happening at the club you support within the first two months of the season, one of your star players blasting the entire organizational hierarchy has to be pretty high up there. That's exactly what's happening at Manchester U...

How quickly can the owner of a reigning championship team spend down a sudden windfall of goodwill? James Dolan has spent the NBA offseason exploring that hypothetical, and he appears to be a gifted speedrunner. The owner of the New York Knicks began his work before the job...

The American League Championship Series is every bit an American League production, which is to say that it is not for the dilettante, or anything close to an easy watch. It is for people who choose to view sports in their leisure time as penance for past misdeeds rather tha...

If you watched the Broncos-Chargers game on Sunday, first of all, my apologies. You shouldn’t have had to see that. Second of all, you might have come away from that game saying, “Good Lord, Justin Herbert has gone from being overhyped to being actively shitty!” I can’t blam...

A memo prepared for the Las Vegas Raiders by the recruiting firm Korn Ferry was entered as an exhibit in Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores's ongoing racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams. The memo was unsealed by the court yesterday, givin...

A jury found former Kansas City and Miami receiver Tyreek Hill liable on Tuesday night for two counts of battery in his civil trial. The same Miami jury found him not liable on another five counts of battery, one count of assault, one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress, and one count of continuing domestic violence.

The jury awarded Hill's estranged wife, Lakeeta Vaccaro, $500,000 in compensatory damages, but did not award any punitive damages.

The trial came about as part of the couple's ongoing divorce in which Vaccaro said Hill physically and verbally abused her during their marriage, including once trying to punch her in the stomach while she was pregnant with their daughter. Hill told jurors that that he did verbally abuse his wife, whom he in turn accused of stealing his money, but the NFL wideout said he did not physically hurt her.

Before we get to the feud, let's start with the facts. Molly, the wooden crank-operated automaton made by the artist Bliss Kolb, is a beauty. Although Molly is made of basswood, cherry, and teak, with glass eyes and steel screws, its buttery yellow body and dusky brown wings...

The WNBA was staring down the following issue: After the first two games of the Finals, beginning Saturday at the raucous 18,064-seat building which the Golden State Valkyries have sold out for two straight years, the series would move to Atlanta, where the Dream’s primary a...

Find a new slant!

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 about bread heels, beer guts, gastropubs, Digger, and more.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m off 'bag duty next week while I finish up a special feature assignment. But don’t worry; we’ll have a guest host ready to entertain your finest inquiries. Just hit up the funbag email address and they’ll be waiting for you.

Your letters:

The NBA season is one week away, and there's one game I can't stop thinking about. On Nov. 2, Kawhi Leonard's Toronto Raptors will travel to Los Angeles to play the Clippers, his former team and the subject of the NBA's harshest-ever punishment over the cap shenanigans they ...

This past Friday, Christine Brennan asked to speak with an editor at Defector. The USA Today columnist's request was somewhat expected, since Giri Nathan had written about her in an article published two days earlier, the piece critical of her fixation with measuring the WNB...

The practice of surrogacy can be said to date back to the Bible; in Genesis 16, Abram is promised descendants by God, but his wife Sarah is unable to conceive. Sarah then instructs Abram to lay with her handmaid, who is then able to bear his child and fulfill God’s promise. ...

The technical term for them is Transient Luminous Events, and it's a good term. Transient, because they last just a few milliseconds. Luminous, because they light up the sky, but also because they invoke the radiant immanence of an old-testament manifestation. Events because—well, imagine you saw this. You would agree this was an Event.

The most commonly observed TLE is a red sprite, an enormous electrical discharge shooting upward from thunderstorm clouds, usually a blood-red color due the excitation of nitrogen atoms. Below is one of the finest images of sprites ever recorded, by nature photographer Florian Riou last month:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1japWjrkl/

I like to imagine a wised-up contrarian reading Ray Ratto's blog about the Milwaukee Brewers' Game 1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, which identifies a formula in the way the Brew Crew are progressing through the National League playoffs. It's not a vague, vibes-based ...

At times it really does feel like time is moving faster than ever, and even things that happened a year ago might as well have happened 10 years ago. But it is important to maintain perspective, and understand that time and history have to play their parts before we can prop...

The lead-up to Sunday's game between Liverpool and Manchester City could not have felt more strange. Here were the two teams that have defined approximately the last decade of the Premier League, who have been each other's fiercest rivals while setting new standards for exce...

You heard it here first: It's time to play our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Jeremy Venook and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.

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.