The Washington Post brings us a story today that could only be produced by Donald Trump's administration of influencers. According to two sources who spoke to the Post under the condition of anonymity, photographers from several news outlets were banned from Pentagon press b...

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night. The Wizards spent a portion of the fourth quarter of the game selling out anything recognizable as a basketball principle in an effort to prevent Adebayo from breaking a scoring record. They sent pani...

It’s Monday morning and I’m ready for the start of NFL free agency. The window to sign players doesn’t officially open for another two days, but Monday represents the start of the league’s open tampering period, which comes on the heels of the league’s actual tampering perio...

A little over three months from today, on June 13, the Boston metropolitan area is set to host the first of its seven 2026 World Cup matches, a group-stage clash between Scotland and Haiti. Despite kickoff being that close, local officials face an alarming number of unanswer...

Look at it this way: Now Maxx Crosby doesn't have to write one of those treacly letters to Las Vegas Raiders fans thanking them for their love and devotion and swearing eternal fealty to them, before heading off to work for another fan base that he will learn to love just as...

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And yet there is no timeline long enough that could have prepared me for Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points in an honest-to-goodness NBA game before I, personally, died. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfH...

The crack of the bat. The smell of the grass. Hasty, scrawled attempts to understand and calculate a run-quotient formula. The romance of baseball is rarely felt as keenly as when it requires math. But those are the Wednesday night plans for Team USA, which after losing to I...

Part of the charm of the World Baseball Classic is that it takes your favorite athletes and places them in different arrangements. It answers fantastical questions: What if all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers played on different teams? What would it look like if you p...

In what could very well go down as the biggest upset of the season, San Antonio Spur and intermittent blogger Luke Kornet somehow has successfully blocked the Atlanta Hawks' attempt to honor an iconic local institution, the Magic City strip club. In response to the handwring...

If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and underst...

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 brackets, bartenders, hot people with shitty taste, and more.

Your letters:

Chuck:

Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.

This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.

Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.

Madison Booker is a perfectly polite, charismatic young woman, but there is no other player in her sport for whom the word "rude" comes to mind as often. In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that,...

The University of Maryland honored all the basketball team’s departing seniors on Sunday before facing Illinois. Diggy Coit, Collin Metcalf, Elijah Saunders, and Solomon Washington walked onto the court with family and assorted loved ones, and got framed jerseys and drawings of themselves to commemorate the end of their run in College Park.

Their Maryland careers are over, yet it seemed like they'd all just gotten here. Well, OK, they all did just get here. Every honoree in this year's senior crop was a first-year Terp. You gotta combine all their days in College Park together to amount to what only yesterday passed for a standard college stay.

“Yeah, it was not the typical mood for a senior day,” says Maryland booster Jack Cullen, who says he can “count on two hands” how many Terps home games he’s missed since his days as an undergrad in the late 1970s. 

It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see...

Despite what a pair of suspicious NBA owners have whispered to Pablo Torre, I don't believe that the NBA rigs the draft lottery. Certainly, it makes a sort of cockeyed, intuitive sense that the league would want to reward the Dallas Mavericks with a generational prospect in ...

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall ...

Following the Iran women's national soccer team's third group-stage match of the 2026 Women's Asian Cup, five members of the team have reportedly defected and are now in protective Australian police custody. The defections come on the heels of a turbulent week for the team f...

The Miami Dolphins are releasing Tua Tagovailoa, eating an NFL-record $99 million cap hit just to do it. It's an ignoble end to Tua's six seasons in Miami, but it was inevitable to anyone who has watched the Tua roller coaster. Even with an offensive wunderkind like Mike McD...

When video of FBI Director Kash Patel falling on his little ass during this year's annual FBI vs. Secret Service hockey game was exclusively provided to us, we were told by our source that Patel fell down at least two more times during the game. Defector has now received additional footage from the game, and can confirm another instance of Patel eating shit while attempting to skate.

Wow, he fell right over.

On a Sunday full of get-a-load-of-this, it was going to be hard to beat this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQBt5lAolQM

Oh, and there were 15 goals in that game, too. It happened in a venerable old barn, with a team that hasn't been good in almost 15 years but is suddenly brilliant pulling out an 8-7 win after leading 4-1 and trailing 7-5. It also drove the gerbils at YouTube positively bat-guano crazy, which is the newest measure of big-deal-hood.

We’ll give you the Monday crossword. Are you gonna solve it? This week’s puzzle was constructed by Daniel Hrynick and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan lives in Winnipeg, where he works as a laborer for Public Works. Every so often he will get a song stuck in his head that turns into a crossword idea. This time, the song was 54-Across in an SNL sketch.

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.

DENVER — The Colorado Avalanche's home building, 26-year-old Puck Arena, is a blandly serviceable midpoint between the old-school kookiness of Calgary's Saddledome and the blinding shininess of Edmonton's Rogers Place. But it's what's on the inside that counts, and credit wh...

Jayson Tatum played his second game of the season Sunday, after having set what seems like an all-time record for the fastest recovery from a ruptured Achilles tendon. Tatum made his debut Friday at home against the Dallas Mavericks, 298 days from his last appearance, and wa...

Paradise is a good show. I have to get that out of the way early, because I do think that it's fun and well-plotted and knotted with enough twists to sustain a strong momentum throughout its eight-episode seasons. The premise is simple enough, though doled out slowly through...

Call it the Orson Scott Card problem. You want to recommend a piece of sci-fi to a friend, but you know that if you do you'll have to include the disclaimer that the author's politics are diametrically opposed to your own, and you find them downright objectionable. You trul...

For my money, the best part of any World Baseball Classic is not the back end of the tourney, when the field has been whittled to the world's best and the level of play is immaculate. Sure, there's some good baseball there, and high drama, and it's where bragging rights trul...

Tuning in for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Saturday night (Sunday afternoon in Melbourne), I was expecting many things. I was expecting Aston Martin to retire from the race early in order to avoid causing Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll physical harm. I was e...

EDMONTON, Alberta — While fans of the Calgary Flames are steeling themselves to say goodbye to the Saddledome at the end of the 2026–27 season, their rivals to the north are worried about a different kind of countdown. Connor McDavid, the franchise center who's piloted the E...

Here is a funny headline, from the CBS Sports website: "Hawks will not cancel 'Magic City' event despite Luke Kornet's public plea." Dang! My faith in Luke Kornet's power to halt the promotional machinery of multibillion-dollar professional sports franchises with mildly word...