As my variously diseased sports-watching habits go, my fondness for college basketball feels like the most disreputable. The Mets are a family thing. West Coast MLB and NBA games, between teams I don't care about, are mostly about proving that I am allowed to stay up as late...

What's the difference between betting on sports and "trading on a prediction market?" For the gambler herself, very little. If you go on Kalshi, the suddenly ubiquitous "prediction market" platform that has enjoyed the backing of the Trump administration, one can click on th...

Nothing But Respect is a little late this week due to a small error that I explain here at the opening of the episode. We had Tyler Parker of the Ringer on this week, because he's an Oklahoma City Thunder fan and after several of our most recent guests have teed off on OKC, we thought it would be a good idea to get a Thunder partisan on the podcast to talk about what it's like to be the villain. Harry also conducted extensive research into the guys who were responsible for defending Wilt Chamberlain in his 100-point game.

It should be noted that this episode contains discussion of Charlie Brown Jr.

This week we are launching The Span, Defector’s first and only culture newsletter. Every other week, we will collect the best non-sports writing from Defector so that you won’t miss anything, and also let you in on what we’ve been reading elsewhere. Like the Culture section itself, this newsletter will be driven entirely by our…

A lot of folks don't like the NHL's current playoff format, which tries its best to sequester teams within their own divisions for the first two rounds before matching up the winners in the conference final. The goal is to deliver more rivalries and repeat match-ups in the e...

It's been a bit of a tough go for newspaper readers in the San Francisco Bay Area this past week, not that it necessarily matters to the outside world. Two longtime staples of the sporting palaver industry, Dave Newhouse, most notably of the Oakland Tribune, and Carl St...

The men’s NCAA tournament begins today, and I hope that you’ve got everything you need on hand to enjoy the games when they tip off later this afternoon. Beer? Check. Pre-scheduled takeout order for wings? Check. A slipshod plan to flee the office an hour after lunch? Oh yeah, that’s a check.

Almond butter?

What’s that, you have no almond butter on hand? You had all winter to get ready for this weekend, and you forgot to get your hands on some of that nutty, oily goodness? Buddy, what the FUCK is wrong with you? Everyone is about almond butter these days, even this Arizona player who I know nothing about.

The colonial travelogue was already a bloated genre by the time Jonathan Swift decided to poke fun at it in the 1720s. London publisher Richard Hakluyt began compiling folios of “true relations” penned by returning sailors as early as the 16th century. They had an episodic q...

Whose puck is it? Jack Hughes's overtime goal to win Olympic gold is hockey history, maybe the single most important physical object in American hockey history. You could make the case for some Miracle equipment which surely smells awful by now, but that wasn't even the gold...

You can tell a lot about a college basketball fan by what they miss. Cut me open and the concentric rings of idle sentiment that have accrued over a lifetime spent caring about this stuff will date me to my precise moment of conversion, on a well-timed sick day back in middl...

I’m a sucker for contrarian tournament picks. Sure, I could spend some time telling you why a one-seed is going to win the title, but who really finds joy in touting the favorite? You’d have to be a heartless sociopath to do that, whereas I am a normal man who spends a lot o...

March came in like a lion last night. An off-balance three-pointer from UMBC at the buzzer caromed off the backboard, allowing Howard University to survive a crazy and clutch comeback and advance to the main pool of the NCAA tournament. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAA5nqPsH-w

Howard’s win, which was in a “first four” play-in game but is being accepted as the first March Madness win in school history, made me really happy. Like all of D.C., I need bread and circuses out the wazoo these days. But there’s more to it here. Howard University’s sports have been a punchline or worse my whole life, and since before I was even around, and that's a mighty long time. 

The WNBA and the league’s players’ union have reached a verbal agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, they announced early Wednesday morning. According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, the new CBA will include maximum salaries over $1 million, minimum salaries over $30...

As Bryce Harper rounded the bases on his game-tying two-run homer in the eighth inning of Tuesday night's World Baseball Classic final, he exchanged a salute with his commanding officer, third base coach Dino Ebel, then moved to point at the American flag patch on his unifor...

For two seasons now, NBA viewers have bemoaned the league-best Oklahoma City Thunder defense. Not because it's physically talented or schematically savvy—it is both—but because it's seemingly built on the premise that officials cannot detect and call every single foul that o...

Afroman, once world famous for his song about being high (though I always preferred "Crazy Rap" myself), has emerged as a new kind of internet folk hero in the aftermath of an incident in 2022 with Cincinnati police, when Adams County police officers broke down the door to h...

For almost my entire life, Venezuela has been a punching bag, a nasty joke couched in fake concern. I used to participate in some of that punching, to be clear. But as I grew into political consciousness, I struggled to reconcile, both within myself and whenever I was asked ...

Above you see the fully revamped Tennessee Titans uniforms for the upcoming 2026 season and beyond. The first thing you’ll notice about these uniforms is that they look great. The second thing you’ll notice is that they’re not new at all. They’re just the old Houston Oilers ...

While the world's attention has largely been focused on the war the United States and Israel launched on Iran a few weeks ago and the rapidly unfurling series of subsequent, predictable calamities, such as the invasion of Lebanon and the constriction of the Strait of Hormuz,...

And here we see a shining example of the main peril of using sports as a reason to wrap oneself in the flag. When you look down and see that you've lost your pants, the flag makes a poor trouser substitute. But hey, it's the risk you run when you play that game, as Team USA...

For a seventh straight night, the WNBA and players' union left an all-day collective bargaining session Monday without a deal in place. The two sides have spent around 90 hours in in-person meetings since last Tuesday. Union president Nneka Ogwumike told reporters this past ...

Raw power is winning out these days. While one of the great pleasures of the sport is watching the intersection of sharply contrasting styles of play, I have temporarily set aside all those nuances. The main matchup I want to watch right now involves two players with almost ...

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 music books, living on the moon, the NCAAs, and more.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! I’ll always remember when I called it St. Patty’s Day online and everyone yelled at me that it’s “St. Paddy’s Day” not “Patty’s.” I despise the Irish now.

Your letters:

Half an hour into the Nitehawk Workers Union’s winter rally, 50 or so people had gathered across the street from the Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater to chant, hold signs, and shiver on a Friday too cold for the season. Most of them were your usual labor supporters—members of ...

At a glance, the Japanese water scavenger beetle Regimbartia attenuata looks like any other beetle. It is small, black, and pleasantly round. It has your standard set of beetle legs (six) and is otherwise unassuming. It is, you might imagine, the exact kind of bug that a fro...

It's always good when the NBA tells you when it plans to do something it has already decided to do. You can think of the NBA's all-but-announced expansion gambit as a hamster wheel. Not as a piece of exercise equipment for indentured rodentia, but as a consumer product—you g...

On March 10, the Bigfoot Society noted an "unprecedented" multi-day mass migration of bigfoots—possibly bigfeet—in the vicinity of Portage County, Ohio. The "unidentified bipedal hominids" were moving southeast in a "coordinated movement." Two bigfoots were spotted around Ma...

Chip-maker Nvidia became a multi-trillion-dollar company the classic way: by selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush. As the generative AI bubble swelled and distended, Nvidia was there to sell the GPUs needed to feed it. Today it owns more than 80 percent of the market for chips involved in AI. This has been great for its shareholders, and less than great for anyone looking to purchase consumer electronics at normal prices.

But Nvidia's roots are in video games, still one of the most processing power–demanding things the average person interacts with on a regular basis. It has supplied graphics processors to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. At a presentation on Monday, Nvidia introduced its newest technology, bringing generative AI to gaming. And it looks mega-butt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJACkKbN-Eo

The greatest betrayal of my life was when my little sister texted the group chat a screenshot of the movie Goat with a demand to "clear your calendars," and over my protests, my older sister agreed, saying that she was "actually dying to see this movie." The screenshot my li...

Arsenal's blunt-object dominance of the Premier League has given non-Gooners little to enjoy this season. It's not much fun to watch a team set-piece and defend its way to a title, even if the whole point of soccer is to win games by any means necessary. I don't have to like...