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18 Mar 17:54 • Giri Nathan

Oklahoma City Thunder Defense Innovates With Sneaker Block

For two seasons now, NBA viewers have bemoaned the league-best Oklahoma City Thunder defense. Not because it's physically talented or schematically savvy—it is both—but because it's seemingly built on the premise that officials cannot detect and call every single foul that o...

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18 Mar 16:45 • Israel Daramola

Let’s Catch Up On The Hilarious Afroman Defamation Trial

Afroman, once world famous for his song about being high (though I always preferred "Crazy Rap" myself), has emerged as a new kind of internet folk hero in the aftermath of an incident in 2022 with Cincinnati police, when Adams County police officers broke down the door to h...

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18 Mar 16:45 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Viva Venezuela, A Champion At Last

For almost my entire life, Venezuela has been a punching bag, a nasty joke couched in fake concern. I used to participate in some of that punching, to be clear. But as I grew into political consciousness, I struggled to reconcile, both within myself and whenever I was asked ...

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18 Mar 16:45 • Drew Magary

The Titans Will Dress Like A Real NFL Team This Season

Above you see the fully revamped Tennessee Titans uniforms for the upcoming 2026 season and beyond. The first thing you’ll notice about these uniforms is that they look great. The second thing you’ll notice is that they’re not new at all. They’re just the old Houston Oilers ...

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18 Mar 14:45 • Patrick Redford

Donald Trump Is Strangling Cuba To Death

While the world's attention has largely been focused on the war the United States and Israel launched on Iran a few weeks ago and the rapidly unfurling series of subsequent, predictable calamities, such as the invasion of Lebanon and the constriction of the Strait of Hormuz,...

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18 Mar 14:45 • Ray Ratto

Team USA Lost For The Troops

And here we see a shining example of the main peril of using sports as a reason to wrap oneself in the flag. When you look down and see that you've lost your pants, the flag makes a poor trouser substitute. But hey, it's the risk you run when you play that game, as Team USA...

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17 Mar 21:06 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Former NBPA Head Tamika Tremaglio Discusses The WNBA Labor Battle And The Art Of Bargaining

For a seventh straight night, the WNBA and players' union left an all-day collective bargaining session Monday without a deal in place. The two sides have spent around 90 hours in in-person meetings since last Tuesday. Union president Nneka Ogwumike told reporters this past ...

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17 Mar 19:06 • Giri Nathan

I Can’t Get Enough Of The Kaiju Battle Between Aryna Sabalenka And Elena Rybakina

Raw power is winning out these days. While one of the great pleasures of the sport is watching the intersection of sharply contrasting styles of play, I have temporarily set aside all those nuances. The main matchup I want to watch right now involves two players with almost ...

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17 Mar 19:06 • Drew Magary

I Can’t Stop Reading Music History Books

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 music books, living on the moon, the NCAAs, and more.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! I’ll always remember when I called it St. Patty’s Day online and everyone yelled at me that it’s “St. Paddy’s Day” not “Patty’s.” I despise the Irish now.

Your letters:

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17 Mar 17:12 • Jaya Saxena

Fair Pay Feels Good In A Place Like This

Half an hour into the Nitehawk Workers Union’s winter rally, 50 or so people had gathered across the street from the Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater to chant, hold signs, and shiver on a Friday too cold for the season. Most of them were your usual labor supporters—members of ...

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17 Mar 16:45 • Sabrina Imbler

Even After Being Eaten, This Beetle Has Two Ways Out Alive

At a glance, the Japanese water scavenger beetle Regimbartia attenuata looks like any other beetle. It is small, black, and pleasantly round. It has your standard set of beetle legs (six) and is otherwise unassuming. It is, you might imagine, the exact kind of bug that a fro...

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17 Mar 16:45 • Ray Ratto

The NBA’s Expansion Gambit Is About Getting Bigger, Not Better

It's always good when the NBA tells you when it plans to do something it has already decided to do. You can think of the NBA's all-but-announced expansion gambit as a hamster wheel. Not as a piece of exercise equipment for indentured rodentia, but as a consumer product—you g...

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17 Mar 16:15 • Chris Thompson

What Did The Migrating Bigfoot Family Know About This Ohio Meteor Explosion?

On March 10, the Bigfoot Society noted an "unprecedented" multi-day mass migration of bigfoots—possibly bigfeet—in the vicinity of Portage County, Ohio. The "unidentified bipedal hominids" were moving southeast in a "coordinated movement." Two bigfoots were spotted around Ma...

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17 Mar 14:15 • Barry Petchesky

Nvidia Wants To Yassify Video Games

Chip-maker Nvidia became a multi-trillion-dollar company the classic way: by selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush. As the generative AI bubble swelled and distended, Nvidia was there to sell the GPUs needed to feed it. Today it owns more than 80 percent of the market for chips involved in AI. This has been great for its shareholders, and less than great for anyone looking to purchase consumer electronics at normal prices.

But Nvidia's roots are in video games, still one of the most processing power–demanding things the average person interacts with on a regular basis. It has supplied graphics processors to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. At a presentation on Monday, Nvidia introduced its newest technology, bringing generative AI to gaming. And it looks mega-butt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJACkKbN-Eo

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17 Mar 14:15 • Kathryn Xu

A Series Of Facts About ‘Goat,’ The Steph Curry Goat Movie

The greatest betrayal of my life was when my little sister texted the group chat a screenshot of the movie Goat with a demand to "clear your calendars," and over my protests, my older sister agreed, saying that she was "actually dying to see this movie." The screenshot my li...

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16 Mar 18:33 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Teenager Max Dowman Gave Arsenal A Major Coolness Boost

Arsenal's blunt-object dominance of the Premier League has given non-Gooners little to enjoy this season. It's not much fun to watch a team set-piece and defend its way to a title, even if the whole point of soccer is to win games by any means necessary. I don't have to like...

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16 Mar 18:33 • Kelsey McKinney

Brooches Won The Oscars

On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really, good on the red carpet. This year, the big winn...

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16 Mar 18:27 • Israel Daramola

Paul Thomas Anderson Finally Gets His Coronation

There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critica...

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16 Mar 17:42 • Patrick Redford

The Sacramento Kings Can’t Even Lose On Purpose

Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly ...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Albert Burneko

Trump To World: Please Help Me Un-Shoot My Own Leg Off

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Oman, has been effectively closed for over two weeks, since the United States and Israel began their war of aggression against the nation of Iran and Iran responded by, ...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Lauren Theisen

Can I Interest You In A Billiken?

March Madness means it's time to get invested in random schools from places you've never been, and after the bracket reveals on Sunday, I'd like to offer a potential rooting interest: the Saint Louis Billikens men's team. Based indeed in Missouri and not some off-brand St. L...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Chris Thompson

Fernando Alonso’s Extremities Pulped For Pointless Laps In A Worthless Lemon

It must have been surreal and thrilling for Fernando Alonso to find himself in a points position moments after the start of the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. That Aston Martin he's driving is a worthless piece of crap, but because half the grid has still not figured out how to wo...

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16 Mar 16:42 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, March 16: Big Blowup

Make yourself at home and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Dan Zarin and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan is a crossword constructor and freelance writer based in Portland, Maine. Over the years he has been a musician, a hitchhiker, a barista, an advertising copywriter and a food critic, so making puzzles seemed like the next logical step.

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.

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16 Mar 14:39 • Tom Ley

Mentally Ill Former Navy SEAL Inspires Team USA To WBC Final

Team USA had an uninspiring showing during pool play at this year's World Baseball Classic, and thanks to manager Mark DeRosa's struggles with math, needed a little bit of luck to make it to the quarterfinals. But now, after victories over Canada and the Dominican Republic, ...

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15 Mar 19:33 • Kathryn Xu

The Chinese GP Proves Mercedes Domination Might Still Be Fun

It is difficult to be a conscientious viewer of Formula 1, a sport which occurs in discrete windows, not all that frequently, and on tracks with their own variable characteristics that can skew results any which way. To be specific, any possible conclusion to be made off the...

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15 Mar 17:33 • Kathryn Xu

Nobody’s Having More Fun Than The Italians

The World Baseball Classic plays it fast and loose with nationality, even by the standards of ordinary sporting events. Despite the urge to romanticize each element of baseball, this works out to be a broadly neutral-value statement. Lineage, the possibility of citizenship, ...

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13 Mar 17:42 • Ray Ratto

Auston Matthews Is Hurt And The Maple Leafs Are Burnt Toast

This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada's daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers' payroll are America's, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. Bu...

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13 Mar 17:42 • Dave McKenna

Big 12 Pulls Glass Court Following Conference Tournament Fiasco

Basketball is meant to be played on blacktop or hardwood. But some big-thinking Big 12 dumbass big-thought it was time to give glass a shot.

That dumbass is conference commissioner Brett Yormark, who installed a high-tech LED court made of glass for the league tournament, which is being contested this week in Kansas City. Turns out glass is fine for backboards, but, as has been clear since the tourney started, not the floor. So now they're uninstalling it: CBS Sports reported Thursday night that the commissioner, who came to the Big 12 after a run as COO of Jay Z’s Roc Nation, decided to yank his avant-garde surface and replace it with "a traditional hardwood court" forthwith. Yormark said he made the decision after talking to “the coaches of our four semifinal teams.”

Probably could have added “and a personal injury attorney.”

Defector
13 Mar 15:42 • Diana Moskovitz

Rickea Jackson Told Court James Pearce Jr. “Will Kill Me”

Miami-Dade prosecutors filed four criminal charges against Atlanta Falcons edge rusher James Pearce Jr. on Thursday, following his arrest last month. The charges came a few weeks after a Miami-Dade circuit judge extended a temporary restraining order granted to Pearce's ex-g...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Israel Daramola

R&B Wants To Make Pop Music Fun Again

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus, that "pr...