FeedCity: Defector

Defector
06 Apr 17:15 • Lauren Theisen

The Islanders Swap Coaches With Four Games Left In A Playoff Chase

In December of 1995, Patrick Roy let in nine goals in half a game at home against the Detroit Red Wings. With the crowd getting on his case, and the team already in a spiral, Roy exited the ice and promptly told Canadiens brass that he would not be suiting up for Montreal ag...

Defector
06 Apr 17:15 • Ray Ratto

A Vengeful Deity Is Smiting The Lakers

Sometimes circumstances force you to conclude that God bets. And while you may choose to question the existence of a deity, or more specifically wonder who or what it is that would book those bets, the evidence is still the evidence. So, let us walk you over to the Los Ange...

Defector
06 Apr 17:15 • Patrick Redford

Polymarket Apologizes For Taking Bets On American Pilots Downed Over Iran

Less than one month after Kalshi got into a legal whoopsie over whether or not they should pay out bettors who wagered on the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early days of the U.S.'s disastrous war with Iran, the don't-call-us-a-gambling-site's biggest competitor, Pol...

Defector
06 Apr 17:15 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, April 6: Hit Parade

Have a go at our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Faren Roth, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Faren is a soon-to-be Ph.D. student in speech, language, and hearing sciences who lives in Madison, Wis. She discovered the world of crossword construction six months ago, and she's been a bit obsessed ever since! She hopes her first puzzle with Defector is a hit.

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.

Defector
06 Apr 15:15 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Cori Close And UCLA Won At Their Own Speed

There was a moment early in the third quarter of Sunday’s national championship game when you could see exactly how UCLA was going to win and why. The South Carolina Gamecocks, desperate for offense, had taken to gambling now: sending bold passes through traffic, pawing for ...

Defector
05 Apr 21:33 • David Roth

Jo Adell Stole Three Homers And A Win From The Mariners

If Jo Adell hadn't been so precocious, his arrival as a big leaguer would seem right on time. The Angels made him the 10th overall pick of the 2017 MLB Draft and the breadth and voltage of his talent quickly made him one of the top prospects in the sport even before that col...

Defector
05 Apr 20:12 • Rachelle Hampton

Monet, Through The Iris

Claude Monet’s painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. The Path through the Irises hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum...

Defector
05 Apr 18:27 • David Roth

Michigan Is Nasty

As the Final Four game between Michigan and Arizona wound down on Saturday night, the TBS broadcasting crew said a bunch of demonstrably true and contextually confusing things about Arizona. The Wildcats really had entered the game as hot as any program in college basketball...

Defector
05 Apr 16:03 • David Roth

South Carolina Upset Connecticut, But Not As Much As Dawn Staley Upset Geno Auriemma

A college basketball coach in the middle of a meltdown is extended grace that generally wouldn't be granted to any other adult having a tantrum in public. On the merits, there's nothing much to say on behalf of a grown man who is stamping and fuming and turning a Cran-apple ...

Defector
03 Apr 18:03 • Chris Thompson

A Very Sweaty Tiger Woods Called Donald Trump After His Car Wreck

Tiger Woods has been charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test, following his March 27 rollover crash in Jupiter Island, Florida. In documents and public remarks, police laid out some behaviors of Woods that suggested to them that he was ...

Defector
03 Apr 17:39 • Kathryn Xu

Is Konnor Griffin Actually 19 Years Old? Let’s Discuss

Conspiracy theories about athlete ages are not infrequent, though they have declined in popularity recently, and it is rare that they are applied to people from the United States. However, after the release of a concerning video by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a discussion must b...

Defector
03 Apr 17:09 • Patrick Redford

Tech Media Propaganda Operation Makes It Official, Goes In-House At OpenAI

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) show. The Financial Times reports that the recently de-Sorafied AI giant paid somewhere in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars" for the purchase. The deal immediately p...

Defector
03 Apr 17:09 • Defector Staff

Welcome To The Defector ‘Survivor 50’ Midseason Questionnaire

You can count on the things that mark the passage of time on Survivor. Early on, there's the very first tribal council, the first tribal swap, the first double elimination. Nothing looms larger over the early game, though, than the possibility of making the merge. For those ...

Defector
03 Apr 17:09 • Eli Cugini

It’s Time To Grow Up

HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but quality isn't the point. The show is a transparent attempt to induct a new ...

Defector
03 Apr 17:09 • Lauren Theisen

The Wild Card Race Gives Me A Tummy Ache

You know all those photos and videos of folks lined up a million deep at airports last month? It was hard to see those and not feel a sort of ambient discomfort yourself, imagining the stress of being one of those travelers. I know I could only think about how frustrated, anxious, confused, and squished I would feel if I, too, were stuck in that mass of humanity. With that in mind, check out how crunched the chases for the final playoff spots have become in both conferences, with fewer than 10 games remaining in the NHL regular season. These guys are all close enough to smell each other's breath.

Defector
03 Apr 17:09 • Barry Petchesky

Artemis Took A Picture Of Us

Artemis II is headed for the Moon; it quite literally cannot not go to the Moon, now. After a trans-lunar injection burn Thursday evening, there physically is not enough fuel on the spacecraft to do anything but relatively small course corrections. It's on a free-return traj...

Defector
03 Apr 15:09 • Grace Byron

The Gentle Parenting Of Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School who also appears as "Ben" in 10:04, and may or may not be the nameless narrator of Transcription? For some, literary stardom is an aphrodisiac. Sex...

Defector
02 Apr 21:57 • Diana Moskovitz

Female Ref Sues NFL For Discrimination, Says She Was Told To “Shut Your Fucking Mouth” By Another Official

One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued...

Defector
02 Apr 20:06 • David Roth

Chartreuse And Root Beer, With Kelsey McKinney

It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of...

Defector
02 Apr 19:18 • Giri Nathan

Ons Jabeur Is Making It Harder For The Tennis World To Ignore Palestine

For a population that increasingly spends their time and makes their money in the Arab world, tennis players have had almost nothing to say about Palestine. In that respect, they are like most professional athletes in 2026: silent on even the most obvious injustices, possibl...

Defector
02 Apr 17:48 • Chris Thompson

Victor Wembanyama Fattened Up At The Shrimp Buffet

The San Antonio Spurs won again Wednesday night, dumping the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco to move a whopping 40 games over .500. The win was their 10th in a row and 15th in 16; they are presently mounting their second 10-game winning streak since the end of January...

Defector
02 Apr 16:54 • Patrick Redford

Erewhon Is Not A Grocery Store

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon. This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucina...

Defector
02 Apr 16:54 • Ray Ratto

The San Jose Sharks Keep Winning At The Last Possible Moment

It has been 2,500 days, give or take a week, since the San Jose Sharks last played a truly meaningful hockey game. That game was a series-ending 5-1 loss to St. Louis in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, and since then, the Sharks have been the worst team in the league bot...

Defector
02 Apr 14:54 • Tom Ley

Puka Nacua Is In Rehab

Levi McCathern, an attorney representing Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua, told The California Post on Wednesday that his client has checked into a rehab center in Malibu. Last month, Nacua was sued by a woman named Madison Atiabi, who says that Nacua bit her and made an anti...

Defector
02 Apr 14:54 • Barry Petchesky

Artemis Boldly Goes Where No Toilet Has Gone Before

It was about 65 minutes after liftoff, the Integrity spacecraft 800 miles above the Indian Ocean and moving at about 16,000 miles per hour, when the historic words were spoken: "Integrity, Houston, toilet is powered."

It was a spaceflight milestone. Artemis II, which launched from Florida Wednesday evening, will put four humans around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions ceased in 1972. But the Orion crew vehicle, named Integrity, has something those Apollo astronauts lacked: an onboard toilet. As Orion spends its first day boosting itself to a high-Earth orbit in preparation for its lunar jaunt, it's already farther from the planet than any crewed spacecraft in 54 years. That means its toilet is the most distant toilet in the history of humankind.

Defector
01 Apr 18:51 • Samer Kalaf

Florida Picks A Stupid Fight Over The NFL’s Rooney Rule

In a move that perhaps stems from restlessness or jealousy over the federal government getting all the attention, the state of Florida has called for the NFL to get more racist. James Uthmeier, the state's attorney general, announced on March 25 that he would be sending a le...

Defector
01 Apr 17:57 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Oops, Italy Did It Again, Again!

There are many ways to frame what I'm about to say, and I'm sure someone funnier and smarter than me could find the perfect way to really maximize the impact of this sentence. I, however, think the bold-faced truth, with no embellishment, is the funniest way to deliver this ...

Defector
01 Apr 16:39 • Justin Ellis

Rejoice, Tired Parents! Defector Will Raise Your Children Now

When Defector decided to get in on the market for parenting advice, there were many questions we had to consider. After all, there is no shortage of content on parenting at the moment: Oscar-winning movies about the prolonged effects of marijuana usage and guerrilla warfare on fatherhood. Oscar-winning movies on the tragedy of Elizabethan-era motherhood…

Defector
01 Apr 16:00 • Ray Ratto

A Basketball Team Can Be Sold, But Who Owns Its History?

The WNBA is still a fairly new league in both geologic and relative terms, and so the news that the Connecticut Sun had been sold to the folks who own the Houston Rockets and would move to Texas after this season created minimal stir, despite some ambient stink on the deal. ...

Defector
01 Apr 16:00 • Hamilton Nolan

Go Ahead And Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now.

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