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10 Apr 15:48 • Tom Ley

Poor Suckers Who Ponied Up For Expensive World Cup Tickets Boned By FIFA

It is a degrading experience to try to purchase tickets to a hugely anticipated event, and nothing fits that description better than the World Cup. So you can imagine why fans who successfully navigated the labyrinth of presale codes and lotteries and came out of it with a p...

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10 Apr 13:48 • Albert Burneko

Why Would You Ask AI To Tell The Story Of Your Own Life?

Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job there are like a hundred thousand would-be wri...

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09 Apr 20:03 • David Roth

A Feast Of Sludge, With Ed Zitron

Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season...

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09 Apr 20:03 • Patrick Redford

The Trump Administration Is Killing The U.S. Forest Service So It Can Also Kill U.S. Forests

When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a "Land of Many Uses." This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service's management of the forestland covering over a third of the United ...

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09 Apr 18:51 • Owen Lewis

Men’s Tennis Is, Once Again, Too Fast

Complaints that men’s tennis is too fast go back further than I do. “Aces, Aces…men’s tennis too fast for its own good,” reads the headline to a 1992 Associated Press story that, to help make its point, begins with a quote from Casablanca. “Well, you just have to guess where...

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09 Apr 18:21 • Chris Thompson

Tony Vitello Might Be Too Candid For His Own Good

The San Francisco Giants shut out the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-0, Wednesday night, for their second consecutive shutout victory and first home series win of the season. The Giants are 5-8 and presently in last place in what is shaping up to be a tough NL West—yes, behind eve...

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09 Apr 17:36 • Tom Ley

Free Press Dipshit Humiliates Herself In Public Again

By now, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold has established her beat as doggedly reporting on her own humiliation. This is someone who excels not just at taking an L, but at putting all of her Ls in a big pile and showing them off to whoever happens to be nearby. Reingold's...

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09 Apr 15:36 • Israel Daramola

The Best Songs Of Q1 2026

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

We are a quarter of the way through 2026. Time is just flying by while we all wait to see if global catastrophe will befall us. Fun stuff. So obviously what we all really need is a soundtrack.

What can be said about the year in music after just three months? There's a lot of anxiety, but also a clear desire to free oneself from said anxiety. There seems to be conscious attempt by many to make "end times" music, which sometimes means dwelling in the abyss of the soul, and other times means partying till the party's over, oops, out of time. The human experience contains multitudes.

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09 Apr 15:36 • Patrick Redford

A Post-Tournament Prospect Prospectus, With David Roth

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome David Roth back to the show. Roth knows more about men's college basketball than either Harry or I, but more importantly, he has equally strong opinions about draft prospects. I mean that in both the specific and general senses. We all have guys we like, as well as various archetypes that remain permanently tantalizing.

Lots of good Yaxel Lendeborg chat, so tap in.

Defector
09 Apr 13:36 • Heather Wei-Xi Chen

What Comes After The Garden?

If you could dig up my Google Maps history from Fall 2022, you would find that I had repeatedly searched for how to get from Columbia University to the American Dream mall by public transportation. Located in East Rutherford, N.J., American Dream is the second-largest mall i...

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08 Apr 19:36 • Patrick Redford

The 65-Game Rule Exacerbates The Fake Problem It Was Intended To Solve

The final week of the NBA's regular season is here, and with scant meaningful basketball on the horizon, it's time to debate various NBA awards. Will Victor Wembanyama's narrative momentum help him overtake the obviously correct MVP choice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? Will Karl...

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08 Apr 19:06 • Drew Magary

Mike Vrabel And Dianna Russini Insist There’s Nothing Strange About Them Holding Hands And Hugging At A Hotel

In the midst of yet another apocalyptic news cycle, nothing lifts my spirits more than a good old fashioned sex scandal. And what’s this? It appears that Patriots coach Mike Vrabel, who once told the world he’d cut off his own penis to win a Super Bowl, has decided to make g...

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08 Apr 17:12 • Billy Haisley

Brazilian Funk Continues Innovating Methods For Getting Your Shit Rocked

The thing that has most consistently awed me as I've plunged into Brazilian funk is just how deep the genre is. In its earliest days, funk really was just about as simple as one particular rhythmic sample laid atop existing dancy hits. But the genre's explosion since then ha...

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08 Apr 17:06 • Rafaela Bassili

Anatomy Of A Gaucho

Where its harsh, cold plains stretch toward the Uruguay River, the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is blanketed by the pampas, expansive fields at odds with the sandy beaches and verdant mountains typically associated with Brazil. In fact, Rio Grande do Sul...

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08 Apr 17:06 • Ray Ratto

Can I Tell Another Parent That I Despise One Of My Kid’s Peers?

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, Ray answers a pair of questions on parent peer pressure.

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08 Apr 15:03 • Barry Petchesky

Advances In Basebrawl Weaponry Are Being Made Every Day

It is a rare occasion when baseball players actually land any solid punches in a bench-clearing brawl, and this clip will be no different. No heavyweight blows connected cleanly in Tuesday's bout between Braves starter Reynaldo Lopez and Angels outfielder Jorge Soler. It was...

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08 Apr 15:03 • Israel Daramola

Revisiting Dashboard Confessional, 25 Years Later

Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confe...

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08 Apr 15:03 • Kathryn Xu

What Is A Strike

Well, what is it? According to the official 2026 MLB rules, a strike—in isolation, absent swings and foul tips—is called when "any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone." The strike zone is duly defined, in a long-winded and broadly unpunctuated phrase,...

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07 Apr 19:09 • Patrick Redford

An Uzbek Chess Prodigy Is Laying Waste To The World’s Best Players

While Hikaru Nakamura was making an ignoble sort of chess history, Javokhir Sindarov yawned. Just 12 moves into their fifth-round match at the 2026 Candidates Tournament, the 20-year-old had tied the world's second-ranked player in quite the knot, forcing Nakamura to sit an...

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07 Apr 19:09 • Lauren Theisen

You Can’t Go Home Again, But You Can Visit

The most anticipated sporting event of my life was Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014: the Michigan men's basketball team playing Michigan State in Ann Arbor. I'd grown up around Big Ten basketball, but I was a newly minted Wolverine fan (and a freshman on campus). My matriculation coinc...

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07 Apr 18:27 • Chris Thompson

Willson Contreras Is Sick And Tired Of Being Plunked By The Brewers

Willson Contreras has played in 121 career regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers, by dint of spending the bulk of his career in the NL Central. In 23 of those games, he has been hit by a pitch, including once when he was plunked twice. No other team has hit him ...

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07 Apr 17:15 • Drew Magary

I Wanna Be A Cowboy

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 chefs, noogies, hoodie storage, and more.

I’m back! YAYYY! And what a treat to have Dave McKenna host the Funbag last week in my stead. Let’s all give the man a round of applause, because he’s got more stories to tell than Shakespeare did. A true original.

And now, your letters:

Defector
07 Apr 17:09 • Tom Ley

I Guess We’re Just Waiting Around To See If This Demented Psychopath Kills Everyone

There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type "truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump" into your web browser t...

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07 Apr 15:09 • Luis Paez-Pumar

No One Is Safe In The Champions League Quarterfinals

Now that the World Cup field is set, and the international breaks are over, it's time for the club season's final sprint. The top European leagues have comfortable leaders—except for Paris Saint-Germain, who is only four points up on Lens in Ligue 1—but there's still enough ...

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07 Apr 15:09 • Barry Petchesky

Why We Fly

It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn't die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of times. One was when Orion came back into communications range after 40 nerv...

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07 Apr 15:09 • Ray Ratto

Michigan Met Connecticut In The Muck And Won

Monday's NCAA Championship Game delivered a huge victory for the University of Connecticut, in that Dan Hurley did not bring himself, his team, the university or the coaching profession into three days of disrepute, nor did Dawn Staley repeatedly offer to kick his ass. ...

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06 Apr 19:12 • Kathryn Xu

Mike Trout Starts Hitting, Is Rewarded With Fastballs Directed At His Chin

Watching an all-time great athlete fade into anonymity comes with a perverse sadness: a slow death on a public stage, with stakes that only matter because people have decided to lend it some fictive narrative purpose. In baseball, a sport that worships statistics if there we...

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06 Apr 18:12 • Tom Ley

The Chicago Sky Cost Themselves Angel Reese

The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Re...

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06 Apr 17:36 • Chris Thompson

Giannis Antetokounmpo And The Bucks Are Feuding Right To The End

A couple of Antetokounmpos took the court for the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday, in a home win over the Memphis Grizzlies. Neither of them were the good Antetokounmpo. Thanasis, the second-oldest of the five brothers, played two minutes and scored a bucket. Alex, the youngest, p...

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06 Apr 17:36 • Barry Petchesky

What Would You Do Behind The Moon?

For as reassuring as it may be to know you have a world-spanning team of geniuses overseeing your well-being, the Artemis crew has to get a little annoyed by mission control sometimes, right? They're constantly in your ear and up your butt. They're nagging you to exercise wh...