Exactly one year ago today, Real Madrid Femenino appeared to be on the precipice of a new era. After five years of institutional disinterest and mediocre results, Las Blancas had at last achieved a feat worthy of the club it had until then borne in name only. Back then, in t...

There is no dignified way to promote a book. Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated is a longtime friend of the pod and always a welcome guest, but she is also a busy woman—busy on the bargaining committee for the Sports Illustrated union, busy covering the Women's NCAA Tour...

The International Olympic Committee announced today that any athletes who do not pass a specific chromosome test will be banned from competition. This means that trans women will no longer be able to compete in the single largest showcase for women's sports in the world, and...

Oftentimes toward the end of a basketball game that is sort of but not especially close, one team will take a multiple-possession lead with only a little bit of time left and I, despite having watched the Indiana Pacers stage what felt like dozens of miracles last year, will...

Recently on the subway I observed a phenomenon in person that I had previously only seen on the internet. Two teenage girls sitting across from me were talking to each other. They were both dressed in the teenage girl uniform—loose-fitting jeans, cropped black jacket, white ...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. The year 1996 marked a major shift in music. An era-defining rap beef seemed to pit the entire city of Los Angeles against the entire city of New York. Rap as a whole saw ...

Lumpy, dirty piles of snow, shading to slush and then water, surround an unused rink. In the background, a featureless wall of grey, and a swollen cloud that threatens if not rain then no immediate prospect of sunshine. Deciduous trees bare their branches. In the distance, a...

Buh buh, buh buh, buh buh
Buh buh, buh buh, buh buh

Neh 
Neh-neh 
Neh-neh-neh
Neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh
Neh, neh, neh-neh neh, neh-neh

Oye como va, mi béisbol
Bueno pa’ gozar: béisbol.
Oye como va, mi béisbol
Bueno pa’ gozar: béisbol.

On Wednesday, the New York Yankees played the hosting San Francisco Giants in MLB's Opening Night, which was the first of, really, three Opening Day–esque events to open the season. Today will be the more traditional event of nonstop baseball brain: day baseball into evening...

I have bad news for anyone who was really into consuming or making videos of Charlie Kirk arresting Jeffrey Epstein, or SpongeBob SquarePants fighting Barack Obama in the format of a side-scrolling fighting game: OpenAI has suddenly and unceremoniously pulled the plug on Sor...

Spend enough time on the soccer side of social media and you're bound to come across one of those video-comp odes to the Barclaysman. As proud guy-rememberers ourselves, we of course do not begrudge the pleasant strolls down memory lane these highlight reels take you for, ba...

It's opening day, sort of. The Yankees and Giants will start the season in San Francisco, today's only game. It's a Netflix exclusive, which is an annoying development if you, like, me, want to watch this game, but don't have Netflix and will not buy Netflix. But Netflix mad...

Some will say that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is that the start of the next season, not unlike the spring that soon follows, will herald new hope for a better year. The truth is that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is the inevitable r...

There are broadly speaking two types of gamblers: valuable and not valuable. All are referred to as customers. The latter group are dilettantes. These people deposit maybe once or twice, usually to take advantage of a first-time deposit promotion, but rarely or never ag...

For my money, the funniest recurring bit in Amazon's highly variable action-comedy series Reacher is the use it makes of its main character's blank, brutal sociopathy. Reacher, in Reacher, is generally righteous, but the code that he follows serves mostly to offer him one sh...

Before this week, Dayton James Webber's life was often described as inspirational. In 2010, a story on ESPN described him as a 12-year-old boy who, despite the quadruple amputation of his hands and legs to survive a bacterial infection at age 10 months, lived a spectacularly...

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 universal knife subsidies, noogies, desert island concerts, good doggies, and more.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m out next week on Spring Break. That’s right, baby. Me and my boys are heading down to Cancun to crush some beers and mack on some fine ladies. And not necessarily in that order, muchacho!

I kid, of course. My family and I are off on a road trip all week, which was a good plan seeing as how air travel in this country is no longer possible. But fear not, we’ll have a guest host bagger ready for you folks, so email them your stupid questions and they’ll indulge you. Got all that? Sweet.

The New York Rangers have had a bad enough season as it is, what with being the worst team in the Eastern Conference and all, but charity like this is frankly unbecoming. They left Madison Square Garden Monday night tying a 71-year-old franchise record for fewest shots in a ...

Madison Square Garden is playing host to a copaganda campaign that has infiltrated its sporting events and will culminate in a special concert on March 28, exclusively for officers and civilian employees of the New York City Police Department. Surely you can figure out which...

I've never been to Connecticut except to pass through it, so I personally can't speak to how hospitable it is to visitors. But Syracuse coach Felisha Legette-Jack would be happy if she never saw another Nutmegger for the rest of her life.

"For us to continue to come to Connecticut year after year after year is, to me, it's a personal attack," Legette-Jack said after her Orange lost 98-45 in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Monday. That was just one line of many in her press conference/vent session that all but begged the selection committee to stop grouping early-round teams by region and give Syracuse some other top program's home court to lose on.

"To have to come and be in this particular bracket every freaking year is unacceptable," she said. "It's wrong."

The importance of black literature in America has turned on its relation to the canon, and its proximity to political usefulness. The art and biographies of groundbreaking black figures are often turned into blunt tools with which anodyne lessons about equality and acceptanc...

This week on Nothing But Respect, we invited back returning champion Maitreyi Anantharaman to talk about the biggest basketball news of the week: the looming return of the Golden State Valkyries.

With the new CBA, the WNBA and its labor base avoided missing any games. They will have to fit an entire offseason's worth of business into a five-week window—business that includes not only a regular draft and training camps, but two expansion drafts and the free agency of almost every single veteran player in the league. There's a lot to get into! We also talked a lot about the media coverage of the negotiations, and a little bit about the Detroit Pistons, with whom Maitreyi is coping in incredible ways.

The new baseball season starts tomorrow, and yes, that tall gaunt figure in the black floor length robe with a sickle where its backpack is supposed to be is standing right next to Aaron Judge, its head tilted meaningfully toward the flagpole in right center. It's ...

In what could be filed under a statistically unlikely outcome, Carlos Alcaraz suffered his second loss in three matches. The world No. 1 was upset Sunday in the third round of the Miami Open by Sebastian Korda, who once looked to be one of the top prospects of the current Am...

When Connor McDavid speaks, Edmonton listens because, well, who else is there? The man wasn't nicknamed McJesus for his knowledge of canonical law.

Thus, when he was asked after the latest Oilers' sack-fouling, a 5-2 home loss to Tampa Bay on Saturday, the two-time Stanley Cup finalist and no-time Stanley Cup champion went for subtle condemnation of his division. Depending on whose interpretation you choose to embrace, he also may have quietly groined his own team and its coach. We hesitate to be more definitive because even the ultra-polite Canadian soul gets very snippy in public when the local hockey team is disappointing the customers.

But McDavid used the entire wretched Pacific Division as cover for his own team's current run of walking, and it is a very stylish way of saying, "We stink, too."

The beauty and tragedy of taking part in a great crowd pop is that you had to be there. The TV sound mixers will not do it justice, nor will that guy who filmed the whole thing on his busted iPhone. The YouTube video you’ll pull up years later, trying to remember the moment, will only underwhelm you in relation to the real thing. (You don't understand: I swear this Tim Hardaway Jr. three prompted the loudest reaction in the history of professional sports. I SWEAR!)

So here's the highest praise I can bestow on a highlight: The game-winning shot that sent fourth-seeded Minnesota to the Sweet 16 on Sunday caused such pandemonium that even the sound-mixed, through-a-screen YouTube version of it absolutely rules. Look at the cameras shake! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIC_2C0OnjE

The second government shutdown of the year, this one affecting only the Department of Homeland Security, went into effect on Feb. 14. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are still being funded by last year's One Big Beautif...

Ahead of Sunday's relegation melee between the visiting Nottingham Forest and hosting Tottenham Hotspur, a key match in the fight for Premier League survival, Tottenham fans went all-out for their side, rolling up to the streets of North London and making the whole thing feel like a trophy parade. There were flares, chants, and nervous excitement, as Spurs headed into a home match against the team directly below it in the relegation battle. It was quite a sight to behold:

And then, Tottenham had to play the game. How did that go?

It wasn’t much of one, truth be told. It had little range. It was erratic, as all my attempts at prime athletic achievements were. It was not as erratic as my long-iron play, and only a little more erratic than my four-parry with an epee. It was deadliest from stra...

You don't need to shoot a three here, but you do need to solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Sherman and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a game show writer and researcher who lives in Culver City, Calif., with his two kids and one wife.

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.