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Defector
19 Jan 16:09 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, Jan. 19: Sole Cycle

Why not take our Monday crossword out for a spin? This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids.

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.

Defector
19 Jan 15:27 • Lauren Theisen

The Bears’ Final Magic Trick Was Almost Enough

With less than 20 seconds remaining in Sunday night's Bears-Rams clash, Caleb Williams successfully connected on an impossible-seeming touchdown pass. Chicago's season has been all about improbable comebacks, but this was a new peak. The Bears offense had been mostly stymie...

Defector
19 Jan 00:57 • Samer Kalaf

C.J. Stroud’s Nightmare First Half Dooms The Texans

C.J. Stroud played like a man possessed in Saturday's divisional round game against the New England Patriots. The problem was that for a lot of the first half, the Houston Texans quarterback was a vessel for the spirit of playoff Jake Delhomme. It was a hideous afternoon fo...

Defector
18 Jan 20:39 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Rigging A College Basketball Game Seems Stressful

On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia brought charges against 26 people they say were involved in a scheme to fix bets on college basketball and Chinese Basketball Association games. The point-shaving scheme, according to a 70-page indictment unsealed that morning...

Defector
18 Jan 18:48 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Seahawks Have A Need For Rashid Shaheed

First impressions can be deceiving, but the opening seconds of Saturday’s 49ers-Seahawks NFC divisional round game really did presage the lopsided evening to follow. Maybe the game was over before it began: The Niners won the toss and deferred, perhaps to get a better look a...

Defector
18 Jan 17:48 • Samer Kalaf

John Harbaugh Had The Giants Rework Their Org Chart For Him

News broke Wednesday that John Harbaugh would be hired as the next head coach of the New York Giants, but then the deal continued to be, as they say, hammered out. There must have been a lot of hammers banging away at that thing, because the team's official announcement was ...

Defector
18 Jan 15:36 • Samer Kalaf

Broncos Win The Game, But Lose Their Quarterback

Minutes after the Denver Broncos clinched a spot in the AFC Championship Game with a 33-30 overtime victory over the Buffalo Bills, CBS sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson noticed that something was off with the winning quarterback. "One thing to keep an eye on. It looked like B...

Defector
16 Jan 20:48 • David Roth

It’s Nice To Have A Process, But It’s Better To Have Money

Imagine a very orderly person who lives in an apartment with a very large dog. The two can coexist happily, with each providing necessary support to the other, but there is also going to be a tension inherent to that relationship grounded in the fact that one of the parties ...

Defector
16 Jan 20:24 • Veronica de Souza

Make It Nice: Gallery Wall Tutorial

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have an unused spare room, a crowded gallery wall, and a (partial) resolution to my ugly bathroom sink. Sean asks: We just de-Christmased the front room of our 125-year old bungalow in ...

Defector
16 Jan 17:45 • Nicholas Russell

Natan Last Has Thought A Lot About Crosswords

It may seem like they’ve been around forever, but the crossword as we know it is barely a century old. They started in the New York World in 1913, where it was originally called a “word-cross.” Going on to obsess writers like T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly w...

Defector
16 Jan 17:03 • Ray Ratto

Jonathan Kuminga Is In Basketball Purgatory

It's hard to pinpoint the moment that Jonathan Kuminga first became disenchanted with the Golden State Warriors and their management, so we will have to start the clock with the trade demand that sparked the latest stage in their preposterous standoff. By that reckoning this...

Defector
16 Jan 17:03 • Sabrina Imbler

In The War On Protein, We Have Been Humiliatingly Defeated By Protein

In light of the Trump administration's escalating threats of military action overseas and the militarized occupation of Minneapolis, the administration's announcement on Jan. 11 may have come as a surprise. The White House, it seems, will be ending the war on protein, per a ...

Defector
16 Jan 15:51 • Ray Ratto

Nobody Loves An Ex-Loser Like Buffalo

On December 15, the Buffalo Sabres finally fired general manager Kevyn Adams, and no, there wasn't some kinky backstory. As Comrade Theisen explained, owner Terry Pegula just got kind of sick of him, or more properly, his results. When he was hired, the Sabres had already mi...

Defector
16 Jan 15:09 • Dave McKenna

Texas Tech Is Rich And Good At Everything

Texas Tech is good. Good enough to play into April again. On Wednesday night, the Red Raiders ran away from visiting Utah early and stayed there, winning by a final score of 88-74. JT Toppin played as a reigning and likely future Big 12 player of the year should, with 31 po...

Defector
16 Jan 15:09 • Kathryn Xu

‘Hades II’ Is At War With Itself

This blog contains major spoilers for Transistor, Hades, and Hades II. Supergiant's 2014 game Transistor is a love story in the drapings of an apocalyptic sci-fi action-adventure game. The protagonist, Red, is a singer whose voice is stolen after an attempt on her life. Her...

Defector
15 Jan 21:45 • Giri Nathan

LeBron’s Agent Openly Suggests A Trade For The Lakers On His Podcast

The podcast medium is, among other things, an effective technology for getting people to say extremely ill-advised stuff in public. Ultra-powerful sports agents are no exception. Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports Group and longtime agent to LeBron James, said some wild shit on...

Defector
15 Jan 21:24 • David Roth

What It’s Like When ICE Invades Your City, With Arif Hasan

It is one of the rules of podcasting: if you can avoid it, which you generally can, you should avoid the "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables" trap. This trap's extremely pithy name was inspired by a June 2020 episode of Bill Simmons' podcast entitled...

Defector
15 Jan 18:48 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Morocco Outlasted Nigeria In A Battle Of Africa’s Finest

Wednesday's Africa Cup of Nations semifinals were covered head-to-toe in narrative appeal. Senegal-Egypt was the more straightforward of the two, in an increasingly star-dominated landscape: Former Liverpool teammates Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah faced off internationally fo...

Defector
15 Jan 18:33 • Drew Magary

Fuck The Fourth-Down Bluff

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. We’re on the cusp of the NF...

Defector
15 Jan 16:18 • Lauren Theisen

The Three Words That Best Describe The New York Rangers Are As Follows: Stink, Stank, Stunk

They say that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. The way they played on Wednesday night, the Rangers couldn't make it in a beer league rink in Binghamton. Facing the Ottawa Senators at home, the worst team in the Eastern Conference took its fifth strai...

Defector
15 Jan 16:00 • Albert Burneko

CBS News Is The Trump Administration’s New Laundromat

Back in December, CBS News chief Bari Weiss intervened to spike a deeply reported and extensively documented 60 Minutes newsmagazine story about conditions faced by captives sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador's CECOT concentration camp. Her rationale, as proffered in memos to CBS staff, was that without on-record comment from a member of the administration—which had declined several requests for exactly that—the story lacked necessary balance; without participation from the administration, 60 Minutes was not prepared to give viewers "the full context they need to assess the story."

In case anyone on the face of the Earth was silly enough to buy that Weiss's decision had anything to do with some commitment to balanced and rigorous reporting, this ought to clarify things:

https://bsky.app/profile/cbsnews.com/post/3mcfi5rkdz42m

Defector
15 Jan 14:57 • David Roth

Fascists Are Pathetic

Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a Minneapolis mother and shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding answers from the Hilton hotel group on X.com. "Why did your team in Minneapolis cancel our federal law enforcement officer and agent...

Defector
14 Jan 19:30 • Lauren Theisen

The Blue Jackets Are The Fun Kind Of Bad Team

The Columbus Blue Jackets play hockey like they're skating on some sort of ice treadmill: You see a lot of effort, but they don't actually go anywhere. This is a squad that always listens to those jamokes in the stands who yell shooooot, playing a fast and loose style that h...

Defector
14 Jan 18:57 • Giri Nathan

Stephen A. Smith Attributes Outstanding NFL Performance To The Late Charlie Kirk

On Tuesday's edition of ESPN's First Take, Stephen A. Smith described a football game that could not have occurred in our earthly realm. "We saw Charlie Kirk catch eight receptions for 144 yards," he said. It's possible that Smith saw this in a vision, but "we" did not: The ...

Defector
14 Jan 18:51 • Jae Towle Vieira

Mom Crimes And Other International Laws

Everyone knows there are 50 ways to leave your lover, but the 50 ways of introducing your boyfriend to your parents don’t get as much airtime. First impressions with a new partner are notoriously tricky and can be panic inducing, but how long could you reasonably delay the m...

Defector
14 Jan 18:33 • Patrick Redford

Let Your Buyers Become Your Criers When You Pull The Rug Out From Beneath The Table Of Success

I have some unsurprising news: Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched a memecoin to combat antisemitism, and someone connected to the coin's launch appears to have executed a clean rug pull within an hour of its launch, making off with roughly $1 million, cratering t...

Defector
14 Jan 18:09 • Tom Ley

CBS Anchor Tony Dokoupil Is Stuck In An Endless Loop Of Humiliation

The new era of CBS Evening News, under the editorial direction of Bari Weiss and featuring new anchor Tony Dokoupil, is off to a rough start. Weiss is meddling and pouting, Dokoupil is not ready for primetime, and the ratings are already slumping compared to last year's numb...

Defector
14 Jan 18:09 • Patrick Redford

How Michigan’s Man On The Inside Got Caught

The 2023-24 Michigan Wolverines season was a campaign of maximalism. Not only because they went 15-0 and won the National Championship, but because they did so while packing a decade's worth of scandals into one year. If you wanted to learn everything about the sport, in all...

Defector
14 Jan 17:00 • Chris Thompson

Giannis Antetokounmpo Is Curdling

Giannis Antetokounmpo is having a bad time. Tuesday night he opened the second half of a home game against the Minnesota Timberwolves with a baseline spin into a tough contested layup over Julius Randle, and finished the play on the ground. Antetokounmpo, seated beneath the basket, formed up the double-thumbs-down gesture, raised it up over his head, and booed loudly. He was not booing the referees, who'd whistled Randle for a foul on the play; he was booing the fans. After Giannis was helped to his feet, he continued to boo his team's fans. He felt it was only fair: Those same Milwaukee unfaithful, after all, had booed the Bucks only minutes earlier.

"Whenever I get booed, I boo back," Antetokounmpo explained after the game. "It won't change home or away."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNSlUzRndy8

Defector
14 Jan 16:27 • Barry Petchesky

‘The Disintegration Loops’ Are Music’s Loveliest Death

It is hard to say what mood I need to be in to have the urge to put on The Disintegration Loops, because it is hard to say what mood they express. The same five- or 10-second loop, so obviously mournful and defeated, can sound at another another time—10 minutes later, or 10 ...