"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte Brontë, in the introduction to a selection of Emily's poems published in 1850. Emily had died in 1848, and had not lived to see the publication of the second edition of Wuthering Heights, carefully revised by her older siste...

A series of posts and direct messages from the Twitter account @gethigher77 has been screenshotted, circulated, and attributed to Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant. The contents of those screenshots have been compiled here for your browsing ease. The messages from @gethigher...

It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opac...

On Wednesday afternoon, Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball smashed his custom camo Hummer into another car in downtown Charlotte. Video obtained by local news station WSOC shows a grey sedan entering an intersection, only for Ball's much larger, fast-moving vehicle to swerve in...

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have a curtain dilemma, replacements for “ratty” linens, and advice on how to figure out what you like. Aileen asks: My husband and I just upgraded our apartment here in Germany to one ...

The one and only you is the human forged by the path that only you are on. Facing the not-knowing, putting one foot in front of the other. She's not your trophies. Because our trophies sit on the shelf. It's the bonds we forge with one another that can guide us to what we're here to do, and to be who we are: the one and only you.

The one and only you is the human forged by the path that only you are on.

Facing the not-knowing, putting one foot in front of the other.

On Thursday, a certain freestyle skier will clip her boots on and huck herself down the halfpipe in Livigno, to the feverish anticipation of fans in two countries. Though she was born in the United States and attends Stanford University, she represents and wins medals under ...

I'm not sure I thought I'd ever see the day when an American hockey player who has only worked in Vancouver and St. Paul would be getting covered by E! News, or serve as the lure in catfishing attempts. Quinn Hughes, mainstream celebrity? What a world. Being the subject of m...

On Thursday, the U.S. women’s hockey team will take on Canada in a battle of the women’s hockey superpowers. Every single Olympic gold medal in the history of the sport has been won by one of these two countries. If you're rooting for the U.S., it means watching a team stack...

Just over midway through Tuesday's Champions League playoff between Benfica and Real Madrid, Vinícius struck one of the most beautiful goals of his career. In response to the strike, and to Vinícius's totally normal celebration of it, the incensed Lisbon crowd sent boos, wat...

Anything less than dominance would have been an upset, no matter the opponent. With NHLers at the Olympics, Team Canada had won 13 straight. They hadn't trailed in more than 800 consecutive minutes of game time. Czechia in the quarterfinals shouldn't have forced them to brea...

UCLA men's basketball coach Mick Cronin had a lot of big feelings Tuesday night, during and after his team's 82-59 blowout loss to Michigan State.

As the Bruins trailed by 27 points with just under five minutes left in the game, Michigan State's Carson Cooper caught an outlet pass and rose up to dunk, only to be fouled by UCLA's Steven Jamerson II. It was a hard foul, and ruled a flagrant, but nothing beyond the pale. An enraged Cronin must have read it differently, because he immediately sent Jamerson to the locker room. (A lot of the coverage of this incident has emphasized that Cronin ejected his "own player," as if it were possible for a coach to eject an opposing player, but I digress.)

https://twitter.com/CBBonFOX/status/2023966358242025978

Since returning to figure skating, Alysa Liu has displayed an indifference toward earthly happenings that a bodhisattva would envy. That is not to say that she doesn't express joy upon completing a stellar performance. But she is never particularly moved by wins or losses, w...

Gather 'round, friends, for it is time to play my favorite newly invented game of the Winter Olympics. The game is called "Are The Fellas In Sync," and the way you play this game is by scrolling through Getty Images photos from Team Pursuit Speedskating and asking yourself a simple question: Are these three fellas (gender-neutral) before me truly, honestly, and existentially in sync? We'll start off with an easy round.

Round 1: Patrick Beckert, Fridtjof Petzold, and Felix Maly of Germany

By the end of a cross-country skiing team sprint competition, the athletes are on the brink of collapse. The best teams complete their six-mile sprint in about twenty minutes. Their legs burn, and their lungs are exhausted. With the finish line in sight, almost out of breath, you can imagine how strange it would feel to see suddenly in front of you what looks like a big beautiful wolf.

"I was like, 'Am I hallucinating?" Tena Hadzic, a 21-year-old Croatian skier told NPR. There on the course was a real, live, beautiful wolfdog. He appeared on the final stretch of the qualifying event Wednesday morning and raced along, pursuing the sliding track camera like a superstar before turning to follow a couple of athletes across the finish line. Look at him:

https://bsky.app/profile/rodger.bsky.social/post/3mf56mazwrk2e

I woke to a flurry of notifications on my phone. Overnight in Cortino, Linsdey Vonn violently crashed in her Olympic downhill race and was airlifted from the mountain. My group chat, made up of college friends from a variety of athletic backgrounds, was filled with screensho...

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 China Gardens, paper clips, Robert Duvall, itchy assholes, and more.

Your letters:

Don:

The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying f...

There's all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speedskater guy I saw finish two races backwards, once on accident and once ...

Two conflicting thoughts from Canada’s Olympic semifinal win over Switzerland on Monday: There is no shame in Marie-Philip Poulin being the best player on your team; there is some shame in needing a one-legged 34-year-old in order to score a single goal. Team Cana...

I’m sure I’m telling on myself by revealing this, but Western astrological readings are a staple of my social feeds. (To tell on myself further: Scorpio sun, Gemini rising, Cancer moon.) I don't necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it either, and when I’m se...

NBA All-Star weekend has come and gone, and though the game itself was surprisingly spirited, the most intriguing development of the weekend was the strange story of some leaked DMs from a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts that people connected to those accounts say belong ...

After a league phase in which only Arsenal and Bayern Munich looked truly excellent, the Champions League has arrived at the knockout playoff round. A quick refresher of what that means: In the new format, introduced last season, the top eight teams in the league-stage table...

Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation.

Since diver Tom Daley went viral in 2021 for knitting between events at the Tokyo Olympics, he’s become something of a knitbassador for the craft, and perhaps also an inspiration for this year's Olympians. This year, several athletes are posting their WIPs (works-in-progress) to social media, and as Defector's resident fiber freak, I am going to take this opportunity to review their projects. 

Doug Gottlieb’s a seasoned heel. He was a dependable ass on sports talk airwaves for years, then brought his ass act to the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay bench in 2024 when he got a coaching job—while still keeping his radio gig— and mentored his inaugural squad to a 4-2...

The various skeleton events wrapped up on Sunday, the Brits winning two of the three golds, Austria making away with the other, and the Germans sweeping the silvers and bronzes. However, fixating on the medal count obscures the most important contest of all: Who had the best helmet?

As the controversy involving Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych suggests, skeleton helmets, like hockey goalie masks or Formula 1 helmets, are a part of the sport's aesthetic—and thus, political—culture. This is something to consider when you are choosing your sliding sport: Lugers may get to go feet-first, but they do not get painted helmets because, for whatever reason, they refuse to paint over the visors. What lugers gain in perceived safety, they lose in their ability to look sick as shit. Imagine foregoing the opportunity to look like this:

Weeks after his flirty correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghislaine Maxwell was released for the world to see, Hollywood mogul, superagent, and Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee chairperson Casey Wasserman announced that he will sell his eponymous talent ...

The most intriguing storyline in pro wrestling this month is not a title chase or a bloody feud, but whether or not fans are going to keep chanting "Fuck ICE" at shows. I am more than happy to explain this to you. What's your first question? To be honest, I think of pro wre...

Is this the year when the good times finally end for the Philadelphia Phillies? Probably not. They've got stars all over the damn place, and to judge from years of vitriol you have to assume that by jettisoning Nick Castellanos the Phillies have banked another 20 wins, easil...

Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no f...