Our Monday crossword? It’s good. This week's puzzle was constructed by Will Nediger and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a crossword constructor from London, Ontario who uses the nom de plume Bewilderingly (an anagram of "by Will Nediger").

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.

As you may have heard, the twinned industries that produce art and criticism in this country are embattled. On every side, there is steady conglomeration, privatization, and the rapid uptake of labor-annihilating technology. In tandem, there has been a steady mainstreaming o...

In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to compete, the International Olympic Committee, in a daze, seemed to realize it wa...

Imagine yourself in the beautiful Dolomites of Cortina d'Ampezzo. The air is thin and cold. The stars blaze in the night sky above you. And inside your body is the kind of fear that empties you, that vibrates between your ears, that makes your heart pump so fast you think it...

Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps—and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds today, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.

Here he is soaring fully out of control on his final jump:

As a sport most people pay intense attention to for two weeks every four years and then not at all the rest of the time, curling can be slightly impenetrable to the casual viewer; its intricacies and shibboleths even more so. As the cheating brouhaha between Sweden and Canada enters Day 3, we thought it would be useful to answer some questions you might have over this icy scandal.

What happened?

On Feb. 13, Canada defeated Sweden 8-6 in a men's team round-robin match. The round-robin matches determine who gets into the medal rounds. Early in the game, Sweden accused Canada's curlers of "double-touching" their stones after they'd passed the hog line, and asked officials to keep an eye on the Canadians for further violations. In response, Canada petulantly asked officials to monitor the Swedes for illegal shots as well.

Before Ilia Malinin had his disastrous free skate to lose gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, there was Yuma Kagiyama—who skated a near-perfect short program only to underperform in his free skate on three out of his four quadruple jumps. And before Kagiyama had his disastrous...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Prior to last week, I had n...

On Thursday, the Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos after months of threatening to do so. All offseason, I have read reports that the Phillies wanted to get rid of Castellanos, either by trading him or cutting him, if they had to. The underlying tone ...

It would be hard to make up a more charming athlete story than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo. His life is a line connecting unlikely and poignant points: poverty as a son of Nigerian immigrants in Athens, lower-division Greek basketball as a malnourished teenager, speculati...

What is to be done about NBA tanking? Based on the pissy administrative response from the league to some recently and spectacularly egregious examples of Tank Mode, you might think it is the most pressing problem facing a league that has a few of those. Thankfully, the ...

Work in the outdoor industry long enough, and you’ll learn that only certain jobs in the U.S. are allowed to be taken seriously. Spending your days emailing about nothing is a “career.” Drafting slogans to feed the AI machine? Impressive. Combining the abilities of an EMT, c...

Because last week was such a sad and difficult and busy one for us at the site, and also for the broader world in the way that things have been sad/difficult for some time now, I didn't get around to reading the stellar team coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show t...

While the world's attention is currently focused on the various performances, admissions of infidelity, and blood-soaked mascots of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, the guy running the next Summer Olympics is coming under intense pressure for popping up in the latest tranc...

One hour before the start of the men's skeleton event, Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from participating, after insisting on wearing a helmet with illustrations of Ukrainian athletes and coaches who were killed in the war following Russia's 2022 inva...

To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this opinion is wrong. Luge requires athleticism and dexterity, the ability to st...

Because everyone else at Industrial Foundry No. 682 is basking in the joys of publicly libidinous biathletes and their subtly vengeful exes, snow-runners with nuclear quad muscles, credit card-kiting biathletes, deeply sinister ice dancers, free...

The Olympic spirit takes a few forms. There's total dominance, as the best athletes in the world display their mastery. There's the unlikely upset, when deep underdogs overcome the odds. And then there's the Olympians with no chance in hell. The ones who are outclassed, outm...

How many Premier League teams would you say are super happy with their season so far? I'd put the number at three. First there's Arsenal, which, aesthetic qualms aside, has to be giddy about its prospects of breaking the duck and winning the title. Then there's Aston Villa, ...

Even in sports that do not literally hand out points for style, the matter of aesthetic value is of discursive import. The most dominant athlete or team in the world can be taken down a peg or two on the moral underpinnings of play style. There are hoops (ethical) and hoops ...

If every instinct the U.S. women's hockey team had at the 2022 Olympics was wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. On Tuesday, in their round-robin meeting at the Olympics, the Americans celebrated a 5-0 win over Canada, the sort of thorough beatdown atypical of th...

It is so easy to yield to temptation. My head might know a path leads only to shame and regret, but my heart urges me to take one step, and then another. It started on Tuesday, with news that Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid chose, for some reason, to use the occasion...

Televisually speaking, my one complaint about the Winter Olympics is that even with expert commentary, the skills on display in many events are not so obviously different from one another that I can tell them apart. I cannot tell any trick that anyone on skis or a snowboard does from any other trick that anyone else does; I have to take Johnny Weir's word for what is an axel vs. what is a salchow; and watching ski jumping is like looking at a painting. But when it comes to Johannes Klæbo, perhaps the best athlete at these Games, it is hilariously obvious that no other cross-country skier can touch him.

For one, he's up there, while his competitors are back there, but more relevant to our purposes, he can pound out the pace on skis in a way that nobody else can. Look at this man go.

https://youtu.be/bXDTrg52LIM?si=hpfoH4fDurHhMP8y&t=157

Huge breaking news in Detroit on Tuesday: The Tigers came to a deal with a multi-time Cy Young winner universally beloved by fans. No, not Tarik Skubal, who's still due to become a free agent after this season. Nearly a decade since he was traded to the Astros, Justin Verlan...

This week on Nothing But Respect, we are covering the trade deadline in a very characteristic way, by which I course mean we spent most of the episode talking about Giannis Antetokounmpo's Kalshi investment, prediction markets, and the increasingly fractured and incoherent ways the sport is consumed and talked about. In other words, we went back to the well. Harry also talked about the influencer Clavicular and this Sam Kriss essay on him as a way to segue into Zach LaVine and the matter of the small-batch tank job happening in Sacramento.

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

If we are to take stories first from Sportico's Michael McCann and Robert Raiola and later Forbes' Nathan Goldman as actual factuals, and all involved have made their reputations on knowing the whatabouts and whereabouts of money, Sam Darnold's greatest moment as a professio...

Learning that you can just buy ISBNs is like learning that you can just walk into a high-end designer store and touch things. It seems like there should be a more rigorous process to filter out the grubby-fingered like me, but there isn’t. Apparently you can just buy ISBNs o...

When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but by focusing on America’s enormous size, its capacity to hold infinite diffe...

To the layperson, biathlon may be the strangest sport in the Winter Olympics. Most of the sports in the Games involve athletes testing the limits of the human body vis-á-vis gravity (e.g.: big air, ski jumping), sliding (curling, speedskating), or gravity and sliding (figure...

The biathlon encourages athletes to balance two things at once. A competitor must be able to ski a great distance at an immense speed, and then, as if turning off a light-switch, lower their heart rate, aim a gun, and shoot six tiny targets, before returning to skiing around...