A confession: For the past week, I grew convinced that the Carolina Panthers would do it. They had already beaten the Los Angeles Rams once in the regular season, in Charlotte, and this playoff game would be at the same stadium. The weather forecast looked crummy, working ag...

This week, Rolling Stone published an article in which writer Marisa Fox interviewed hostages who were held in Gaza after Oct. 7, talking to them about how music helped them. The artists mentioned in the piece include Frank Sinatra, Bill Withers, and Avenged Sevenfold. What caught my attention was one specific paragraph that was illustrative of the low journalistic standard for writing about Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

The part in question is about 40-year-old Moran Stella Yanai, who was held hostage in Gaza for 54 days before she was released. As you read the following excerpt, your vision might be clouded by some unexplained yellow filter, and the bootleg adhan used in every Hollywood film set in the Arab World will begin to involuntarily play in your head:

What is the point of Unrivaled? Or rather, how seriously should it be taken? It’s easy to understand what the players get out of it: Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart founded the startup basketball league in 2023 as an offseason option for a few dozen WNBA players, offeri...

The Supercopa de España is a bit of a shambolic mini-tournament in the middle of the Spanish domestic season. Since changing the format in 2020—prior to that date, Spain did the normal thing of pitting the winners of the league and the domestic cup against each other in a on...

People are back out on the streets of Minneapolis again, they are barricading the roads and tending curbside memorials, they are asking for someone to make sense of a reckless and unnecessary death at the hands of law enforcement. On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was shot a...

This week researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project announced they have made the kind of breakthrough you might expect from a project with that name: They have potentially identified Leonardo da Vinci's DNA. The announcement ran exclusively in Science on Jan. 6 unde...

Substandard goaltending is not in itself noteworthy, nor even particularly unique this week. On Tuesday, New Jersey's Jacob Markström allowed nine goals on 24 shots, quite possibly the single worst goaltending performance in the NHL's modern era. On Wednesday, St. Louis's Jordan Binnington allowed seven goals, and was intended to be pulled, but his backup wasn't ready, and was later seen looming. Both incidents were fine examples of the exotic dangers of the scariest job in sports. So if you happened to peek at the scoreboard Thursday night and saw the Ottawa Senators had allowed eight goals in a loss to Colorado, you may have wondered: Sure, that's a lot of goals, but are mere goals really enough to command my limited attention? Did the Sens make it weird in any way? Oh, buddy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DTRV13hEr0F/?hl=en

If Miami would've drawn up the ideal scenario for them to come out on top of Thursday night's Fiesta Bowl matchup against Ole Miss, they would've said it needs to be low-scoring, with Miami using the ground and pound game to eat up as much clock and energy on offense as poss...

The ex-girlfriend of Kansas City wide receiver Rashee Rice, Dacoda Nichole Jones, posted 14 photos to her Instagram account on Wednesday, many showing her with bruises on her body, scratch marks, and a broken lip. Jones began the post's caption with "DOMESTIC AWARENESS WARNING!!" The photos also showed a hole in a wall, damage to a cabinet, a closet, and a kitchen. Jones didn't name explicitly name Rice in her post, but she described being in a years-long abusive relationship with a man while living in Kansas and Texas. Rice played college football at SMU before being drafted by Kansas City. Jones and Rice, the Associated Press reported, have two children together.

This is what Jones posted in full, along with the photos:

We at The Distraction HQ do not need much of an excuse to invite ESPN NFL ace and Defector comrade emeritus Kalyn Kahler onto the program. We think she's great at her job and great at talking about it, and the frequency with which she's joined us to speak excitedly about the NFC North and generally "deal with our shit" speaks for itself. But she did make it easy for us this week, with a big, anecdote-rich ESPN story, written with ESPN Raiders reporter Ryan McFadden, on the unusually complicated, surprisingly novel, extremely predictable carnage in the Las Vegas Raiders front office, and sideline, and owner's suite, and I guess also in the offensive line meeting room. Just having to do with the Raiders in general. I suppose one could just write "it is a story about the Raiders" here, in retrospect.

Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the se...

The San Jose Sharks, who own the eighth-best record in the Western Conference, are a top-heavy team with a lot of growing left to do. But my god, what a top. The 19-year-old center Macklin Celebrini, grand prize of the 2024 draft lottery, has launched himself into the mesosp...

By now you've almost certainly seen the video for yourself, or read about it: an ICE agent shooting a Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, in the head from point-blank range, killing her as she attempted to drive away from the scene of an immigration sting where protesters ...

The bad thing about the NBA regular season is that it's too long. The good thing about it is that it's long enough for rich, intriguing storylines to develop. Consider the case of the best team in basketball. One month ago, the dialogue around the Oklahoma City Thunder cent...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

I did not write about it when it happened, but last year there was a bit of a manufactured crisis in rap about the fact that no real rap song had made the Billboard Top 40 for the first time since 1990. The whole topic felt forced, like when ESPN comes up with ridiculously specific stats to fit whatever narrative they want to sell during that particular segment. Rap started as an outsider's genre, so it sounds like a good thing to me to not be apart of Top 40. There's also the fact that most of the biggest pop stars in rap had not dropped much that year: no Drake, no Kendrick, no Travis Scott. And if you look a little below the Top 40, you'll find Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, and NBA Youngboy. It's really not that big of a deal.

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. It’s 11:00 p.m. and I’ve ju...

The United States invaded Venezuela late Friday, in a mission called "Operation Absolute Resolve." The invasion, which resulted in the abduction by Army Delta Force commandos of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, reportedly was the culmination of months of planning. A grou...

Darryn Peterson, freshman at Kansas and top prospect in the 2026 NBA draft, has something keeping him off the floor. Those deeply invested in either this Jayhawks season or Peterson's NBA future might find themselves close-reading the cryptic remarks of Kansas head coach Bil...

On Wednesday in Minneapolis, masked government agents apparently representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surrounded a stationary vehicle stopped in the middle of a residential street. One of them demanded that the driver "get out of the fucking car," and yanke...

Stevie Nicks famously sang the line "Lightning strikes / maybe once, maybe twice." But on Tuesday night, Tampa Bay exceeded Ms. Nicks's expectations, lighting up the night with four goals as they beat the league-best Avalanche to extend their win streak to eight games. It w...

Last month, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss decided to make Tony Dokoupil, then the host of the network's three-hour morning show, the new lead anchor on CBS Evening News. In any other circumstance, it might be hard to figure out how this promotion was issued to a guy wh...

What combination of ingredients might make for spectacular mess of a story? The 1970s? A big party in an industrial loft? What about a long rope, one kiloleter of lager, and the desire to make a gesture so grand it will impress the woman of your dreams. Get ready, y’all. We haven’t seen hijinks as misguided as these since the infamous night burger fiasco.

The hours since John Harbaugh was binned in Baltimore have dragged comfortably into double digits and are easing towards actual days—not a long period of time by normal standards, but long enough that he has already been crowned the best available choice for whatever coachin...

Each time Matthew Zipple, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University, releases a mouse that was born and raised in a laboratory into the green expanse of a field, he is amazed. He transports the mouse in a paper cup, lays the cup on its side in the grass, and takes off the...

I had over a year to prepare for Hiroshi Tanahashi's retirement, yet during his final match on Sunday, I couldn't get myself to believe that his career was about to be over.

It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the concept of the big wrestling retirement show. In fact, the last few years have given fans a larger number than usual of these spectacular, supposedly definitive conclusions to legendary careers. Keiji Muto, Sting, and John Cena all starred in the exact kind of show that Tanahashi headlined in front of a sold-out Tokyo Dome this weekend. But Tanahashi was different, even at the end. And rather than write a permanent conclusion to his pro-wrestling tale, he stepped out of the ring at the Dome and right into the toughest challenge yet of his life in the business.

Ever since Lane Kiffin decided he couldn't win a championship at Ole Miss and departed for supposedly greener pastures at LSU, his former team has done its best to prove him wrong. In the face of the coaching chaos heading into the playoff, the Rebels have run over Tulane, b...

The Trae Young era in Atlanta appears to be over, and not in a way that will leave anyone happy. The Hawks and their diminutive point guard—who can be a free agent this summer or exercise a $49 million one-year option—didn't agree to a contract extension in the offseason, l...

Kim Mulkey's weekend started out OK: The Baton Rouge crowd greeted her with applause on Thursday night as she held hands with Lane Kiffin and paraded the school’s new football coach around the court. (To assess the passage of time, consider that Ed Orgeron was the football c...

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 football, auto wipers, road trips, and more.

Whoa hey, I’m back! Let’s see what happened while I was away. Well, my family and I went to Germany for the holidays, only for me to immediately come down with a case of the barfing flu. Then we got stranded in Frankfurt for two days after New Year’s thanks to a missed flight connection, then I had to split my family into separate traveling parties just to get us back stateside before 2029, and then we bombed Venezuela. What an exciting time to be alive. And barfing.

This week's Nothing But Respect with comedian, writer, and actor Devon Walker was a fun, loose one. Topics discussed: Aaron Gordon's Dwyane Wade diss track "9 OUT OF 10"; the regrettable Kendrick Lamar GQ shoot; which SNL people can ball; the necessity of distinguishing a player's on-court swag from their off-court swag; which numbers are cool (55) and which are bad (anything above 40 "unless you have a good reason"); Veeze making fun of Tony Snell; and whether or not Tidjane Salaün's mini-surge is any of our problem.