FeedCity: Defector

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16 Mar 18:33 • Kelsey McKinney

Brooches Won The Oscars

On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really, good on the red carpet. This year, the big winn...

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16 Mar 18:27 • Israel Daramola

Paul Thomas Anderson Finally Gets His Coronation

There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critica...

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16 Mar 17:42 • Patrick Redford

The Sacramento Kings Can’t Even Lose On Purpose

Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly ...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Albert Burneko

Trump To World: Please Help Me Un-Shoot My Own Leg Off

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Oman, has been effectively closed for over two weeks, since the United States and Israel began their war of aggression against the nation of Iran and Iran responded by, ...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Lauren Theisen

Can I Interest You In A Billiken?

March Madness means it's time to get invested in random schools from places you've never been, and after the bracket reveals on Sunday, I'd like to offer a potential rooting interest: the Saint Louis Billikens men's team. Based indeed in Missouri and not some off-brand St. L...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Chris Thompson

Fernando Alonso’s Extremities Pulped For Pointless Laps In A Worthless Lemon

It must have been surreal and thrilling for Fernando Alonso to find himself in a points position moments after the start of the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. That Aston Martin he's driving is a worthless piece of crap, but because half the grid has still not figured out how to wo...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, March 16: Big Blowup

Make yourself at home and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Dan Zarin and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan is a crossword constructor and freelance writer based in Portland, Maine. Over the years he has been a musician, a hitchhiker, a barista, an advertising copywriter and a food critic, so making puzzles seemed like the next logical step.

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.

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16 Mar 14:39 • Tom Ley

Mentally Ill Former Navy SEAL Inspires Team USA To WBC Final

Team USA had an uninspiring showing during pool play at this year's World Baseball Classic, and thanks to manager Mark DeRosa's struggles with math, needed a little bit of luck to make it to the quarterfinals. But now, after victories over Canada and the Dominican Republic, ...

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15 Mar 19:33 • Kathryn Xu

The Chinese GP Proves Mercedes Domination Might Still Be Fun

It is difficult to be a conscientious viewer of Formula 1, a sport which occurs in discrete windows, not all that frequently, and on tracks with their own variable characteristics that can skew results any which way. To be specific, any possible conclusion to be made off the...

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15 Mar 17:33 • Kathryn Xu

Nobody’s Having More Fun Than The Italians

The World Baseball Classic plays it fast and loose with nationality, even by the standards of ordinary sporting events. Despite the urge to romanticize each element of baseball, this works out to be a broadly neutral-value statement. Lineage, the possibility of citizenship, ...

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13 Mar 17:42 • Ray Ratto

Auston Matthews Is Hurt And The Maple Leafs Are Burnt Toast

This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada's daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers' payroll are America's, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. Bu...

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13 Mar 17:42 • Dave McKenna

Big 12 Pulls Glass Court Following Conference Tournament Fiasco

Basketball is meant to be played on blacktop or hardwood. But some big-thinking Big 12 dumbass big-thought it was time to give glass a shot.

That dumbass is conference commissioner Brett Yormark, who installed a high-tech LED court made of glass for the league tournament, which is being contested this week in Kansas City. Turns out glass is fine for backboards, but, as has been clear since the tourney started, not the floor. So now they're uninstalling it: CBS Sports reported Thursday night that the commissioner, who came to the Big 12 after a run as COO of Jay Z’s Roc Nation, decided to yank his avant-garde surface and replace it with "a traditional hardwood court" forthwith. Yormark said he made the decision after talking to “the coaches of our four semifinal teams.”

Probably could have added “and a personal injury attorney.”

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13 Mar 15:42 • Diana Moskovitz

Rickea Jackson Told Court James Pearce Jr. “Will Kill Me”

Miami-Dade prosecutors filed four criminal charges against Atlanta Falcons edge rusher James Pearce Jr. on Thursday, following his arrest last month. The charges came a few weeks after a Miami-Dade circuit judge extended a temporary restraining order granted to Pearce's ex-g...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Israel Daramola

R&B Wants To Make Pop Music Fun Again

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus, that "pr...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Barry Petchesky

That Puck Must Have Said Something About Tage Thompson’s Mother

Give me the biggest hockey man you have. No, even bigger than that. Make him huge. Make him tall, thick, and dense—a real slab. Give him a powerful slapshot, and a willingness to use it. Make it the fastest, hardest, heaviest shot in the sport. Make him eager to use it. Let ...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Drew Magary

Vikings Attempt To Replicate Sam Darnold Experiment By Signing Shorter, Moodier Sam Darnold

After a courtship that took longer to consummate than a Victorian marriage, Kyler Murray has signed a deal with the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikes are on the hook for a single season at the league minimum, with the quarterback’s former employer, the Arizona Cardinals, picking ...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Sabrina Imbler

Vindicated At Last In My Years-Long Loathing Of Grammarly

I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new star...

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12 Mar 19:51 • David Roth

Kebab Juice On The Windowpane, With Rohan Nadkarni

There's a type of unearned pride that comes with watching your buddies do well, but it carries some anxiety with it. Of course we were happy that Rohan Nadkarni, our frequent guest and lunch correspondent, was doing such good work for NBC's Sports Desk newsletter from the Mi...

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12 Mar 18:51 • Patrick Redford

Live Nation Gets To Keep Its Monopoly Thanks To Trump’s Department Of Justice

On Monday, while the nation's attention was focused squarely on the war with Iran, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division announced that it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against one of the most loathed companies in the country: Live Nation Entertainment, th...

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12 Mar 17:54 • Stefan Fatsis

Competitive Scrabble Is A Lexical Shitshow

This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged.

Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada. The younger-kids division included a 4th-grader who was training with the reigning North American title-holder, Mack Meller, who himself competed in the event more than a decade earlier.

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12 Mar 17:54 • Samer Kalaf

UFC And FBI Announce Two Days Of Activities For Kash Patel

The UFC and FBI announced on Wednesday that a group of MMA fighters will visit Quantico this weekend, "to host an exclusive training seminar for academy students as well as senior FBI staff from around the world." I think we can all guess which senior FBI staff member wanted...

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12 Mar 17:54 • Albert Burneko

A List Of Better Ways To Experience The Frisson Of Transgression Than Becoming A Fascist

You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of "The Young Women Leaving the New Right," a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented by, in Adler-Bell's formulation, the "overweening, haughty moralism of Peak ...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

Netflix Has Trapped Pete Davidson In His Garage

People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way t...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Sabrina Imbler

This Pink Bug Is Not A “Rare Freak Mutant” After All

On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Robert Rubsam

The Academy Missed Some Of 2025’s Best Film Scores

What do you listen for in a great movie score? An iconic theme, perhaps, or a meaningful leitmotif that ties the film together. Maybe you want something innovative, compositions that make a film feel contemporary as they mine the cutting edge. Or maybe you just want a grand,...

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11 Mar 19:54 • Ray Ratto

There’s Always A Way To Deny The Undeniable

Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acr...

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11 Mar 19:54 • Billy Haisley

Iran Plans To Boycott World Cup Due To FIFA Peace Prize Winner’s Murderous, Unprovoked War

Iran's participation in the U.S.-hosted 2026 World Cup promised to be an uncertain, contentious matter even before the U.S. and Israel started raining bombs on Iranian political leaders and schoolgirls alike. The American government had already denied visas to several member...

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11 Mar 19:36 • Patrick Redford

Associated “Association Update” Update, With Will Anderson Of Hotline TNT

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome on Will Anderson of Hotline TNT. Will is the main creative force behind one of my favorite guitar-forward bands, our second guest to be awarded Best New Music by Pitchfork, and a lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fa...

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11 Mar 19:00 • Giri Nathan

Joao Fonseca Takes Jannik Sinner To The Limit, And Justifies The Hype

Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca is a generational talent. Or an imminent bust—you tell me. His scant tenure on the men's tennis tour has served as a case study in the lunacy of early-career cycles of hype and disappointment. What's clear is where he stands right at this momen...

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11 Mar 19:00 • Albert Burneko

I Will Never Forgive Trae Young For Surpassing Kobe Bryant’s Career High For Assists In A Game Eight Times

Kobe Bryant was not just some normal NBA player. No indeed: He was the second-best shooting guard in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers franchise, and something like the 11th-best Laker overall, and possibly one of the dozen or so best players who played the bulk of their...