Madison Booker is a perfectly polite, charismatic young woman, but there is no other player in her sport for whom the word "rude" comes to mind as often. In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that,...

The University of Maryland honored all the basketball team’s departing seniors on Sunday before facing Illinois. Diggy Coit, Collin Metcalf, Elijah Saunders, and Solomon Washington walked onto the court with family and assorted loved ones, and got framed jerseys and drawings of themselves to commemorate the end of their run in College Park.

Their Maryland careers are over, yet it seemed like they'd all just gotten here. Well, OK, they all did just get here. Every honoree in this year's senior crop was a first-year Terp. You gotta combine all their days in College Park together to amount to what only yesterday passed for a standard college stay.

“Yeah, it was not the typical mood for a senior day,” says Maryland booster Jack Cullen, who says he can “count on two hands” how many Terps home games he’s missed since his days as an undergrad in the late 1970s. 

It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see...

Despite what a pair of suspicious NBA owners have whispered to Pablo Torre, I don't believe that the NBA rigs the draft lottery. Certainly, it makes a sort of cockeyed, intuitive sense that the league would want to reward the Dallas Mavericks with a generational prospect in ...

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall ...

Following the Iran women's national soccer team's third group-stage match of the 2026 Women's Asian Cup, five members of the team have reportedly defected and are now in protective Australian police custody. The defections come on the heels of a turbulent week for the team f...

The Miami Dolphins are releasing Tua Tagovailoa, eating an NFL-record $99 million cap hit just to do it. It's an ignoble end to Tua's six seasons in Miami, but it was inevitable to anyone who has watched the Tua roller coaster. Even with an offensive wunderkind like Mike McD...

When video of FBI Director Kash Patel falling on his little ass during this year's annual FBI vs. Secret Service hockey game was exclusively provided to us, we were told by our source that Patel fell down at least two more times during the game. Defector has now received additional footage from the game, and can confirm another instance of Patel eating shit while attempting to skate.

Wow, he fell right over.

On a Sunday full of get-a-load-of-this, it was going to be hard to beat this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQBt5lAolQM

Oh, and there were 15 goals in that game, too. It happened in a venerable old barn, with a team that hasn't been good in almost 15 years but is suddenly brilliant pulling out an 8-7 win after leading 4-1 and trailing 7-5. It also drove the gerbils at YouTube positively bat-guano crazy, which is the newest measure of big-deal-hood.

We’ll give you the Monday crossword. Are you gonna solve it? This week’s puzzle was constructed by Daniel Hrynick and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan lives in Winnipeg, where he works as a laborer for Public Works. Every so often he will get a song stuck in his head that turns into a crossword idea. This time, the song was 54-Across in an SNL sketch.

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.

DENVER — The Colorado Avalanche's home building, 26-year-old Puck Arena, is a blandly serviceable midpoint between the old-school kookiness of Calgary's Saddledome and the blinding shininess of Edmonton's Rogers Place. But it's what's on the inside that counts, and credit wh...

Jayson Tatum played his second game of the season Sunday, after having set what seems like an all-time record for the fastest recovery from a ruptured Achilles tendon. Tatum made his debut Friday at home against the Dallas Mavericks, 298 days from his last appearance, and wa...

Paradise is a good show. I have to get that out of the way early, because I do think that it's fun and well-plotted and knotted with enough twists to sustain a strong momentum throughout its eight-episode seasons. The premise is simple enough, though doled out slowly through...

Call it the Orson Scott Card problem. You want to recommend a piece of sci-fi to a friend, but you know that if you do you'll have to include the disclaimer that the author's politics are diametrically opposed to your own, and you find them downright objectionable. You trul...

For my money, the best part of any World Baseball Classic is not the back end of the tourney, when the field has been whittled to the world's best and the level of play is immaculate. Sure, there's some good baseball there, and high drama, and it's where bragging rights trul...

Tuning in for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Saturday night (Sunday afternoon in Melbourne), I was expecting many things. I was expecting Aston Martin to retire from the race early in order to avoid causing Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll physical harm. I was e...

EDMONTON, Alberta — While fans of the Calgary Flames are steeling themselves to say goodbye to the Saddledome at the end of the 2026–27 season, their rivals to the north are worried about a different kind of countdown. Connor McDavid, the franchise center who's piloted the E...

Here is a funny headline, from the CBS Sports website: "Hawks will not cancel 'Magic City' event despite Luke Kornet's public plea." Dang! My faith in Luke Kornet's power to halt the promotional machinery of multibillion-dollar professional sports franchises with mildly word...

Of all the trade deadlines, the NHL's is the best because it is the most active and most chaotic. How chaotic, you ask? Try this. The St. Louis Blues traded defenseman Colton Parayko to the Buffalo Sabres, a big deal given the fact that, in a reversal of traditional fortunes...

I remember individual seasons of Survivor by and for their "mood." This is a nebulous bit of recall, because "mood" (or "vibe," if you will) is both subjective and insufficient; distilling roughly twelve hours of programming into one word is inevitably going to leave a lot o...

When old guys who played for Lou Holtz talk about him, from my experience, they don’t bring up schemes or Xs and O’s. They bring up speeches from the crusty but legendary coach, TV pundit, and rah-rah guy who died Wednesday at 89 years old. No, not loathsome political speeches. Football speeches.

“That guy could talk,” says Bruce Hanson. He played for Holtz at William & Mary from 1969 through 1971, his first three seasons as a college head college coach. Hanson remembers that Holtz, even as a 32-year-old rookie who’d previously held only assistant jobs at W&M, Iowa, Connecticut, South Carolina and Ohio State, was already as great a motivator as the game had ever seen.  

“When he was done with his pregame speech you woulda wanted to go beat the Chicago Bears,” Hanson said. 

Last Thursday, the Kansas State legislature passed SB 244, overriding a veto by Governor Laura Kelly and enshrining anti-trans law as unhinged in its fury as it is disheveled in structure. Here at Defector, we are committed to explaining incredibly stupid shit so that it can...

The animal kingdom is ruled by open sexual relationships. Bats, beetles, and bonobos all have multiple partners over a season or a lifetime. Barnacles and barracudas don't even get to pick their partners, simply spewing their eggs and sperm into milky clouds underwater. But ...

CALGARY, Alberta — The Germans are famous for squishing words together to form useful new compounds. But Calgarians perfected the art when they came up with "Saddledome." You look at it, and you say, Yup, that's a Saddledome. The building occupied by the Flames since 1983 i...

The trick with every Formula 1 season is to believe, at the start, that it will be exciting. Fortunately, if last year's preview was any indication, sports fans tend to be quite good about doing this. But this year, this year really, there is a lot to be excited for. There'...

President Donald Trump did not fire multiply radioactive Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday, a day after members of Congress grilled her over agents of her department murdering American citizens, her having viciously slandered those murdered Am...

You think about difficult things when you're stranded: dark thoughts of vanishing horizons, daunting ifs and thens, promises made to yourself on sleepless nights. And so it was for me last week, when a blizzard delayed our return home from a vacation long enough for me to miss recording the podcast. "If I ever make it home to my podcasting setup again," I swore to myself from the extremely comfortable hotel room that my wife and I wound up staying in for two delightful nights longer than expected, "I pledge that we'll have Spencer Hall on the podcast."

These are the sorts of promises you make when you don't know if you're good for it, at moments when you don't know what a promise is worth. But look:

A tenant in a Brooklyn building owned by Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo has not had heat in his apartment since Feb. 23, when a blizzard dropped over 19 inches of snow on New York City. Between the months of October through May, when the outside temperature drops...

We may be witnessing the final days of Antoine Griezmann at Atlético Madrid. French by birth, Spanish by formation, and Uruguayan by choice, the culturally omnivorous superstar is apparently on the cusp of a long-gestating move to America, where he will be able to indulge an...

Three days before the first race of the Formula 1 season, it is impossible to overstate just how badly the Aston Martin team, newly headed by racecar guru Adrian Newey, have managed to botch it. Any attempt to summarize from an outsider's perspective will mostly boil down to...