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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...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Barry Petchesky

That Puck Must Have Said Something About Tage Thompson’s Mother

Give me the biggest hockey man you have. No, even bigger than that. Make him huge. Make him tall, thick, and dense—a real slab. Give him a powerful slapshot, and a willingness to use it. Make it the fastest, hardest, heaviest shot in the sport. Make him eager to use it. Let ...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Drew Magary

Vikings Attempt To Replicate Sam Darnold Experiment By Signing Shorter, Moodier Sam Darnold

After a courtship that took longer to consummate than a Victorian marriage, Kyler Murray has signed a deal with the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikes are on the hook for a single season at the league minimum, with the quarterback’s former employer, the Arizona Cardinals, picking ...

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13 Mar 15:42 • Sabrina Imbler

Vindicated At Last In My Years-Long Loathing Of Grammarly

I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new star...

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12 Mar 19:51 • David Roth

Kebab Juice On The Windowpane, With Rohan Nadkarni

There's a type of unearned pride that comes with watching your buddies do well, but it carries some anxiety with it. Of course we were happy that Rohan Nadkarni, our frequent guest and lunch correspondent, was doing such good work for NBC's Sports Desk newsletter from the Mi...

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12 Mar 18:51 • Patrick Redford

Live Nation Gets To Keep Its Monopoly Thanks To Trump’s Department Of Justice

On Monday, while the nation's attention was focused squarely on the war with Iran, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division announced that it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against one of the most loathed companies in the country: Live Nation Entertainment, th...

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12 Mar 17:54 • Stefan Fatsis

Competitive Scrabble Is A Lexical Shitshow

This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged.

Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada. The younger-kids division included a 4th-grader who was training with the reigning North American title-holder, Mack Meller, who himself competed in the event more than a decade earlier.

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12 Mar 17:54 • Samer Kalaf

UFC And FBI Announce Two Days Of Activities For Kash Patel

The UFC and FBI announced on Wednesday that a group of MMA fighters will visit Quantico this weekend, "to host an exclusive training seminar for academy students as well as senior FBI staff from around the world." I think we can all guess which senior FBI staff member wanted...

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12 Mar 17:54 • Albert Burneko

A List Of Better Ways To Experience The Frisson Of Transgression Than Becoming A Fascist

You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of "The Young Women Leaving the New Right," a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented by, in Adler-Bell's formulation, the "overweening, haughty moralism of Peak ...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

Netflix Has Trapped Pete Davidson In His Garage

People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way t...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Sabrina Imbler

This Pink Bug Is Not A “Rare Freak Mutant” After All

On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative...

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12 Mar 15:54 • Robert Rubsam

The Academy Missed Some Of 2025’s Best Film Scores

What do you listen for in a great movie score? An iconic theme, perhaps, or a meaningful leitmotif that ties the film together. Maybe you want something innovative, compositions that make a film feel contemporary as they mine the cutting edge. Or maybe you just want a grand,...

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11 Mar 19:54 • Ray Ratto

There’s Always A Way To Deny The Undeniable

Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acr...

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11 Mar 19:54 • Billy Haisley

Iran Plans To Boycott World Cup Due To FIFA Peace Prize Winner’s Murderous, Unprovoked War

Iran's participation in the U.S.-hosted 2026 World Cup promised to be an uncertain, contentious matter even before the U.S. and Israel started raining bombs on Iranian political leaders and schoolgirls alike. The American government had already denied visas to several member...

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11 Mar 19:36 • Patrick Redford

Associated “Association Update” Update, With Will Anderson Of Hotline TNT

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to welcome on Will Anderson of Hotline TNT. Will is the main creative force behind one of my favorite guitar-forward bands, our second guest to be awarded Best New Music by Pitchfork, and a lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fa...

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11 Mar 19:00 • Giri Nathan

Joao Fonseca Takes Jannik Sinner To The Limit, And Justifies The Hype

Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca is a generational talent. Or an imminent bust—you tell me. His scant tenure on the men's tennis tour has served as a case study in the lunacy of early-career cycles of hype and disappointment. What's clear is where he stands right at this momen...

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11 Mar 19:00 • Albert Burneko

I Will Never Forgive Trae Young For Surpassing Kobe Bryant’s Career High For Assists In A Game Eight Times

Kobe Bryant was not just some normal NBA player. No indeed: He was the second-best shooting guard in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers franchise, and something like the 11th-best Laker overall, and possibly one of the dozen or so best players who played the bulk of their...

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11 Mar 18:18 • Tom Ley

Report: Unflattering Pictures Of Pete Hegseth Got Photographers Banned From Pentagon Briefings

The Washington Post brings us a story today that could only be produced by Donald Trump's administration of influencers. According to two sources who spoke to the Post under the condition of anonymity, photographers from several news outlets were banned from Pentagon press b...

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11 Mar 17:18 • Chris Thompson

The Wizards Deserve This Humiliation

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night. The Wizards spent a portion of the fourth quarter of the game selling out anything recognizable as a basketball principle in an effort to prevent Adebayo from breaking a scoring record. They sent pani...

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11 Mar 17:12 • Drew Magary

I Am Standing By For News

It’s Monday morning and I’m ready for the start of NFL free agency. The window to sign players doesn’t officially open for another two days, but Monday represents the start of the league’s open tampering period, which comes on the heels of the league’s actual tampering perio...

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11 Mar 17:12 • Patrick Redford

Boston’s World Cup Stakeholders Are Squabbling Over Money

A little over three months from today, on June 13, the Boston metropolitan area is set to host the first of its seven 2026 World Cup matches, a group-stage clash between Scotland and Haiti. Despite kickoff being that close, local officials face an alarming number of unanswer...

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11 Mar 17:12 • Ray Ratto

Maxx Crosby Is Back In Football Purgatory

Look at it this way: Now Maxx Crosby doesn't have to write one of those treacly letters to Las Vegas Raiders fans thanking them for their love and devotion and swearing eternal fealty to them, before heading off to work for another fan base that he will learn to love just as...

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11 Mar 15:09 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Bam Adebayo Breaks The Concept Of Basketball, Scores 83 Points

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And yet there is no timeline long enough that could have prepared me for Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points in an honest-to-goodness NBA game before I, personally, died. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfH...

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11 Mar 15:09 • Barry Petchesky

Mark DeRosa Might’ve Boned This Big-Time

The crack of the bat. The smell of the grass. Hasty, scrawled attempts to understand and calculate a run-quotient formula. The romance of baseball is rarely felt as keenly as when it requires math. But those are the Wednesday night plans for Team USA, which after losing to I...

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10 Mar 19:42 • Kathryn Xu

Even At The World Baseball Classic, The Mariners Cannot Escape Themselves

Part of the charm of the World Baseball Classic is that it takes your favorite athletes and places them in different arrangements. It answers fantastical questions: What if all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers played on different teams? What would it look like if you p...

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10 Mar 18:54 • Israel Daramola

The Atlanta Hawks’ Magic City Night Was Too Misunderstood To Live

In what could very well go down as the biggest upset of the season, San Antonio Spur and intermittent blogger Luke Kornet somehow has successfully blocked the Atlanta Hawks' attempt to honor an iconic local institution, the Magic City strip club. In response to the handwring...

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10 Mar 18:27 • Ray Ratto

My Coworkers Browbeat Me Into Drinking James Harden’s Wine

If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and underst...

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10 Mar 17:36 • Drew Magary

The Kindness Of Familiar Faces

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 brackets, bartenders, hot people with shitty taste, and more.

Your letters:

Chuck:

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10 Mar 17:09 • Albert Burneko

If Cool The Pan Be, A Lousy Breakfast For Thee

Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.

This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.

Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.