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Defector
25 Feb 19:36 • Luis Paez-Pumar

I Lost My Mind Watching (Almost) All Of ‘Survivor’ In A Year

Conventional wisdom states that no one really cares about another person's dreams unless they're been paid to care, but humor me. Over the last year or so, I have had a recurring dream in which I am a player on Survivor. It's not always the same dream, exactly, but the forma...

Defector
25 Feb 18:31 • Ray Ratto

Arte Moreno Is Done Pretending To Care

It has been five days since Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno made the claim that his team's fans view winning baseball as a low priority, and the reaction has been, well, fairly low priority. It could hardly be any other way, because "low priority" is the Angels in a nut...

Defector
25 Feb 17:48 • Patrick Redford

Tank Me Later, With Ock Sportello And Sam Sheehan

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I intended to talk to the show's lawyer Ock Sportello about his recent story on Kevin Durant, as well as Harry's Defector blogging debut on Rich Paul's stupid podcast. We did do that, but we also welcomed Sam Sheehan from You Kno...

Defector
25 Feb 16:36 • Defector Staff

An Extensive And Exhaustive Player-By-Player Preview Of ‘Survivor 50’

There's nothing quite like a returnee season of Survivor. Wednesday night's Season 50 premiere will begin the sixth season in the show's history featuring a cast entirely of returning players: 24 veterans of Survivor, split into three tribes of eight, will compete over 26 da...

Defector
25 Feb 16:36 • Sabrina Imbler

What I Learned From My Annoyingly Long Correspondence With “Elena Ferrante”

Earlier this month I received an email that, for a moment, made my heart skip. The email came from someone named Elena Ferrante, at "elenaferrante800@gmail.com," and I feel no remorse leaking Elena's email here because, of course, whoever or whatever was emailing me is not t...

Defector
25 Feb 14:12 • Lauren Theisen

The U.S. Hockey Men Spoil The Fantasy

To be a U.S. Olympian is to represent the best that your country has to offer. That sounds extremely lofty when it's written out like that, but I think that's really how it works, ideally, if you're taking in the best possible message from NBC's explicitly patriotic broadcas...

Defector
24 Feb 21:09 • Defector Staff

Defector Wuthers Some Heights

Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember. This holds true whether you last read it in high school, or a month ago. There is always some weird detail, some brutality, some incomprehensible human interaction that you overlooked. Everyone remembers the ghos...

Defector
24 Feb 19:06 • Drew Magary

How Do I Get My Lazy Teen To Pick A College?

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 rug spills, shitty Chinese takeout mainstays, college visits, and more.

Your letters:

Mike:

Defector
24 Feb 18:21 • Post-Postdoc

Something Of Moderate Size And Importance Is Happening

My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into L...

Defector
24 Feb 18:15 • Israel Daramola

Is ‘Industry’ Losing Its Edge?

Industry has always been a show with a lot of "too online" energy. A cocaine tornado of culturally in-vogue reference points, from Euphoria to Safdie brothers' movies to Tik Tok vids about finance bros. So it shouldn't be too surprising that, while the internet is conspiracy...

Defector
24 Feb 17:36 • Hannah Seo

What Should Recorded Musicals Do?

One dreary weekend this past December, I decided to fight back the winter gray with the color and vibrancy of musical theater. I routed myself not to Times Square but to the closest AMC, which was screening the recorded live performance of the 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll...

Defector
24 Feb 16:03 • Samer Kalaf

Cherien Dabis Discusses The Challenges Of Writing, Filming, And Distributing A Palestinian Movie

For Cherien Dabis, it all comes back to 1948. Her latest film All That's Left of You takes place primarily across three different decades, with a brief visit to a fourth at the end, but for her, this story couldn't be told without depicting the events of the Nakba, the mass ...

Defector
24 Feb 15:27 • Ray Ratto

The Winter Olympics’ Sour Ending Was Just A Preview For Summer 2028

Now that the Olympics are over and their two most noteworthy gold medals, the men's and women's ice hockey championship, have been clawed by the gangrenous mitts of politics, we can now embrace the awfulness by association of the next two large-scale sporting events to be he...

Defector
23 Feb 20:33 • Dave McKenna

One Big Punch Keeps Ryan Garcia’s Career Afloat

Ryan Garcia spent most of the last few years sabotaging his fight career. He smoked, drank and drugged during training. He went on a bizarre bad behavior spree, lowlighted by a series of racist posts sent out to his many million social media followers, earning sanctions from...

Defector
23 Feb 18:33 • Tom Ley

Kash Patel Thinks He’s On The Team

One defining feature of the second Trump administration is the bewildering juxtaposition between various job titles and the people who actually fill those positions. "FBI Director" evokes a commanding presence: someone tall, obviously cunning, and more than a little bit evil. I don't think you would visualize a little weirdo who looks like he has only ever entered a room by accident.

Current FBI Director Kash Patel is precisely that kind of little weirdo. He looked just as uncomfortable and out of place as he always does when he showed up in the Team USA locker room Sunday, to holler, drink beers, and enjoy Toby Keith's music with the players who had just won a gold medal by defeating Canada 2-1 in overtime.

https://twitter.com/WilliamTurton/status/2025716894636929264

Defector
23 Feb 17:54 • Patrick Redford

Jeffrey Epstein And His Network Of Rich Freaks Were Obsessed With The Chiropractor

As the number of powerful, wealthy people revealed to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein increases, so too does the coherence of their collective excuse: They only knew Epstein as a genius of math and science, a polymath who could dispense tax advice worth hundreds of mill...

Defector
23 Feb 16:06 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, Feb. 23: It’s An Art, Not A Science (Themeless)

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelsey Dixon and Alex Boisvert, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Alex is a crossword constructor from California who is so uncomfortable writing anything positive about himself that he wanted to do a goofy bio. Kelsey is a gorgeous and brilliant crossword constructor from Chicago who is not plagued by this affliction.

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.

Defector
23 Feb 15:21 • Ray Ratto

Team USA Had The Golden Goalie

So you're wondering one day later if the final Olympic event ended fairly, and we're here to tell you that it did. Sweden beat Switzerland in the women's curling final, and there’s no disputing it. But for those of you who stream and have mastered the difference between "li...

Defector
23 Feb 14:42 • Maya Goldberg-Safir

Cardte Hicks Played Above The Rim And Ahead Of Her Time

As Cardte Hicks leapt toward the hoop, the audience at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium suddenly hushed. These were the final minutes of the Women’s Professional Basketball League’s All-Star Game on Feb. 9, 1981, where an undersized squad from the West was blowing out the fa...

Defector
22 Feb 19:33 • Sabrina Imbler

Finally! An Ancient Fish That Understood Life’s Terrors

The Cambrian period is most famously remembered as an era of biological experimentation, with bizarre creatures such as Hallucigenia, whose body resembled anti-bird spikes, and Wiwaxia, which looked like a medieval flail come to life. But the Cambrian should also be remember...

Defector
22 Feb 18:15 • Sabrina Imbler

It’s Time To Get Cozy At The Podium

It is the end of your Winter Olympics event. You have crossed the finish line, landed all your jumps, or done whatever sporting melange comprises the biathalon or Nordic combined successfully enough to earn yourself a medal. Congratulations! But your body is feeling a little...

Defector
22 Feb 17:36 • Lauren Theisen

Jack Hughes Sheds Blood And Teeth For His Country, U.S. Wins Olympic Gold

In the third period of Sunday's USA-Canada gold medal men's hockey game, the American forward Jack Hughes spit blood after he took a high stick to the mouth from Sam Bennett. The ensuing four-minute penalty didn't lead to a U.S. goal to break the 1-1 deadlock, but less than ...

Defector
22 Feb 16:30 • Lauren Theisen

Mikhail Shaidorov Celebrated Gold By Skating In A Panda Suit

The NBC Saturday primetime broadcast used the figure skating exhibition gala as a way to provide a curtain call for their appointed Olympic protagonists. Of the five segments they aired from the event, four of them put Americans in the spotlight. Amber Glenn gave a fierce pe...

Defector
20 Feb 22:42 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Still Country For Old Women

Megan Keller was a 21-year-old next-big-thing-on-defense when she won her first Olympic gold medal, in Pyeongchang, the winter before her senior year of college. She was also very nearly the reason her team lost it. The refs whistled her for an illegal hit on Canadian captai...

Defector
20 Feb 18:45 • Harry Krinsky

Rich Paul’s Podcast Was Built To Be Useless

Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports and active NBA agent, has drawn some ire this season for things he said on his new podcast called Game Over, which he cohosts with Max Kellerman. Anonymous members of the Lakers staff were reportedly mad at him for fake-trading Austin Reaves f...

Defector
20 Feb 18:45 • Giri Nathan

Indian Skier Starts, Finishes Race

This morning Dave McKenna was observing, with great pride, that Ireland had won zero medals at the Winter Olympics—not sure that any added context will help a reader here—so I decided to check in on the status of India's squad. There were only two athletes, both skiers: one in alpine and the other in cross-country. More had been written about Arif Mohammad Khan, the alpine skier from Kashmir, and I soon encountered these curious sentences in his Wikipedia entry:

Khan’s expectation in Beijing was to ski and make it to the finish line.[7] Khan now has his eyes set on the 2026 Olympics.[8][9]

You do not often hear an Olympian's ambitions summarized as "make it to the finish line." Time to consult the 2022 men's slalom results to see if Khan had in fact achieved his goal:

Defector
20 Feb 18:45 • Patrick Dubuque

A Season For Hope

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Feb 18.

In his second collection of recollections and reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the physicist Richard Feynman begins his book with the following anecdote:

Defector
20 Feb 17:48 • Billy Haisley

Ohhhhhhhh, Arsenal

I have to come clean about something. For a while now, when writing about the state of the Premier League title race, I have treated an impending Arsenal coronation as basically a fait accompli. This has been in part an earnest reflection of my belief that the Gunners have t...

Defector
20 Feb 15:12 • Kathryn Xu

Alysa Liu Is Untouchable

When athletes are said to thrive under pressure, that generally does not mean that they do not feel it. Rather, the common understanding is that athletes, or at least the great ones, are capable of taking pressure and turning it into fuel. That thermodynamic process is a par...

Defector
20 Feb 14:39 • Ray Ratto

Team USA’s Gold Is Sweeter For The Struggle

The members of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team may not admit to this, but they needed to have the pants scared off them by Canada to give the whole gold medal exercise some badly needed historical context. They needed Hilary Knight's reaper-cheating goal with 2:04 left ...