Lindsey Graham has been on a mission from God. The senator from South Carolina said on Jan. 15 that he would take a spontaneous trip to Israel, less than a month after his visit to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Mike Huckabee to discuss the purpor...

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 Sam Darnold, fighting ICE, conditioner, and more.

Your letters:

Paul:

The first distinguishing characteristic of the Varsity Blues scandal is that it's extremely funny: a bunch of rich parents paid a guy to photoshop their underachieving children into athletic scenarios they were not skilled enough to earn as part of a baroque scheme to get th...

Mixed doubles curling is the sport I'm most looking forward to across all of the Olympics. The competition is a lengthy journey that rewards close attention, but I also believe it's one of the best newcomer-friendly events of the entire Games. Even if you don't know anyone a...

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect has been a long time coming. When Harry and I began working on the show, we came up with a list of dream episodes, standalone topics that we wanted to get to at some point, guests that we thought would be somewhat tricky to get but ...

Have you heard the news? British director Emerald Fennell is making Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic loved by depressed and horny girls everywhere.

Or, more precisely, she is making "Wuthering Heights," because, as she explained in a recent interview, "it is Wuthering Heights and it isn’t—but really I'd say that any adaptation of a novel should have quotation marks around it." Well, OK!

Since it's Emerald Fennell, the movie is sure to have some weird sex stuff going on. Also, since it's Emerald Fennell, the movie will probably be bad. Either way, in anticipation of its release we have decided to read (or, in some cases, reread) the 1847 novel. Please join us as we engage in some turbulent yearning on the Yorkshire moors.

NFL rumor pixies Dianna Russini and Adam Schefter are on the record as saying that there may not be any NFL head coaching openings by Wednesday. Given that Wednesday is still scheduled for tomorrow, this means that one of the league's most vexing employment riddles should fi...

During last summer's NBA Finals, a fully AI-generated commercial featuring people in man-on-the-street interviews yelling towards the camera about all the things they were going to bet on (football games, the price of eggs, hurricanes, alien visitations) introduced the world to Kalshi. Tagline: "The world’s gone mad, trade on it." The ad was made by “AI filmmaker” PJ Ace, who wrote a brief outline of the concept and then had ChatGPT convert it into a more detailed prompt which he then fed into Google’s VEO 3 video generator:

The decision to rely on generative AI wasn’t about saving money—Kalshi is and was extremely well capitalized—but about flaunting a certain kind of trollish, accelerationist posture intended to locate their target audience—people on social media who are very certain about their ability to predict the future.

MELBOURNE — What they say is true: you watch less tennis when you cover a major tournament in person. I can tell you that 15 journalists piled into Sorana Cirstea’s press conference after her three-set loss to Naomi Osaka, which featured some celebration etiquette-related be...

The Washington Post’s suicide-by-1,000-cuts business plan is going swimmingly. Word of the most recent act of self-harm came with a New York Times report on Friday on an internal memo informing the staff that the Jeff Bezos regime had decided “not to send a contingent to the...

Because tennis is thinly disguised psychological torture, it is not a surprise when a tennis player looks like they are having a bad time. Even by those standards, Amanda Anisimova, while on court, wears her emotions on her sleeve; she can also look like she is wrangling wit...

Two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart held up a sign that read "Abolish ICE" during player introductions at an Unrivaled game Sunday, just a day after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. After the game, a 76-71 victory for Stewart's Mist over the Vinyl, S...

On Dec. 20, with the Los Angeles Clippers sitting at 6-21 and one half-game out of last place in the Western Conference, Clippers blogger Robert Flom unwittingly turned his favorite team's season around through the power of posting. He will soon have to make like a beaver and eat some paper to pay for his alterations to the cosmic weft.

Specifically, Flom responded to a tweet from ESPN's Dave McMenamin, in which the Lakers propagandist quoted Clippers coach Ty Lue projecting a plus-15 win differential for his team over the course of the rest of the season. Upon some cajoling from another Clippers fan, who joked about the team going 15-3 upon trading for the decrepit bones of DeMar DeRozan, Flom made his fateful proclamation:

Those who believed, or perhaps just hoped, that Jarrett Stidham might be able to quarterback the Broncos to the Super Bowl had to wait a long time for the Patriots to officially prove them wrong. After the Pats' go-ahead field goal to start the second half, Stidham and the D...

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rafael Musa, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rafa lives in San Francisco with his cat Georgia.

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. 

The several thousand federal agents currently running rampant in the Twin Cities have so far achieved little in the way of legitimate law enforcement objectives, but they have been rather more successful at spreading mayhem and death. Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were b...

It won't be the lead in anyone else's analysis of Sunday's NFL conference championship games, but the news that the Malignant Tangerine In Chief will not be going to the Super Bowl breaking too late to save the turgid New England/Denver game and just soon enough to...

The first half of Sunday's AFC championship game, played between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, was ugly and halting, featuring two bumbling offenses questing for any sort of foothold or forward momentum. Denver quarterback Jarrett Stidham, thrust into acti...

Paul Allen, longtime play-by-play announcer for the Minnesota Vikings and "the voice" of the Minnesota Vikings Radio Network, took a moment on his show on KFAN Friday to engage in some easy right-wing propagandizing. In a conversation about dangerous sub-zero temperatures in...

Giannis Antetokounmpo will miss the 2026 NBA All-Star game. He hurt his calf Friday night in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. Calf injuries are serious business, linked in a few prominent cases with catastrophic Achilles tendon ruptures, and this is Antetokounmpo's second alrea...

On Saturday in Minneapolis, federal agents surrounded 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who'd been filming them in the street with his phone camera as they conducted the federal government's violent invasion and occupation of the city. Vi...

Was the biggest sports story in Ireland this week fake? Or just early? The National League hurling and football seasons kick off this weekend, ending several months of Gaelic sports famine. On Monday, the government-owned broadcast network and news service RTE ran a blockbu...

The origin of Michael Connelly’s new true crime podcast, Killer in the Code, was a rather far-fetched tip fielded by Rick Jackson, a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. A self-described “cold case consultant” named Alex Baber told him that he’d cracked ...

Drama is where you make it, and in how willing you are to inflate a story past the outer limits of its molecular structure. Take the groundbreaking Curt Cignetti Chipotle story as an example; a series of blogs and memes and sports talk radio segments have been launched aroun...

The cheek, to even attempt a deflection from there. It's hard enough to tip in a puck right from the goalie's doorstep. That sucker is small, hard, and moving well above the speed limit, and it's a genuine feat of hand-eye coordination to not just get a blade on it, but to g...

Have you heard the old wives’ tale that if two football teams face each other in four consecutive matches, their fates swap the next season, Freaky Friday style? That seems to be what has happened to Manchester City and Chelsea, whose domestic seasons a year ago were define...

David Roth: I feel like when we have these sorts of conversation blogs on the site, the subject is generally something that everyone kind of likes, but not in a way that they’d fully feel comfortable putting their name on a blog about—your Reachers, or your Wildwood Boardwal...

Ötzi, the 5,000-something-year-old man found frozen in the Alps, did not have an easy go of it. He was probably murdered, shot from behind with an arrow that missed his vital organs and led to heavy bleeding and a prolonged and painful death. Days before his death, he fought...

It's not great, if I'm being honest. From amending my answer to the question "how ya doing Roth" at the very beginning of this week's episode of The Distraction, it is clear that things are not going great. But for the second straight week, we found a way to split our episod...

On Tuesday some number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents camped out near Liam Conejo Ramos's home in the Twin Cities suburb of Columbia Heights and waited for him to return with his father, so they could ambush them. According to news reports, agents grabbed Liam...