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24 Feb 16:03 • Samer Kalaf

Cherien Dabis Discusses The Challenges Of Writing, Filming, And Distributing A Palestinian Movie

For Cherien Dabis, it all comes back to 1948. Her latest film All That's Left of You takes place primarily across three different decades, with a brief visit to a fourth at the end, but for her, this story couldn't be told without depicting the events of the Nakba, the mass ...

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24 Feb 15:27 • Ray Ratto

The Winter Olympics’ Sour Ending Was Just A Preview For Summer 2028

Now that the Olympics are over and their two most noteworthy gold medals, the men's and women's ice hockey championship, have been clawed by the gangrenous mitts of politics, we can now embrace the awfulness by association of the next two large-scale sporting events to be he...

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23 Feb 20:33 • Dave McKenna

One Big Punch Keeps Ryan Garcia’s Career Afloat

Ryan Garcia spent most of the last few years sabotaging his fight career. He smoked, drank and drugged during training. He went on a bizarre bad behavior spree, lowlighted by a series of racist posts sent out to his many million social media followers, earning sanctions from...

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23 Feb 18:33 • Tom Ley

Kash Patel Thinks He’s On The Team

One defining feature of the second Trump administration is the bewildering juxtaposition between various job titles and the people who actually fill those positions. "FBI Director" evokes a commanding presence: someone tall, obviously cunning, and more than a little bit evil. I don't think you would visualize a little weirdo who looks like he has only ever entered a room by accident.

Current FBI Director Kash Patel is precisely that kind of little weirdo. He looked just as uncomfortable and out of place as he always does when he showed up in the Team USA locker room Sunday, to holler, drink beers, and enjoy Toby Keith's music with the players who had just won a gold medal by defeating Canada 2-1 in overtime.

https://twitter.com/WilliamTurton/status/2025716894636929264

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23 Feb 17:54 • Patrick Redford

Jeffrey Epstein And His Network Of Rich Freaks Were Obsessed With The Chiropractor

As the number of powerful, wealthy people revealed to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein increases, so too does the coherence of their collective excuse: They only knew Epstein as a genius of math and science, a polymath who could dispense tax advice worth hundreds of mill...

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23 Feb 16:06 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, Feb. 23: It’s An Art, Not A Science (Themeless)

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelsey Dixon and Alex Boisvert, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Alex is a crossword constructor from California who is so uncomfortable writing anything positive about himself that he wanted to do a goofy bio. Kelsey is a gorgeous and brilliant crossword constructor from Chicago who is not plagued by this affliction.

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.

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23 Feb 15:21 • Ray Ratto

Team USA Had The Golden Goalie

So you're wondering one day later if the final Olympic event ended fairly, and we're here to tell you that it did. Sweden beat Switzerland in the women's curling final, and there’s no disputing it. But for those of you who stream and have mastered the difference between "li...

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23 Feb 14:42 • Maya Goldberg-Safir

Cardte Hicks Played Above The Rim And Ahead Of Her Time

As Cardte Hicks leapt toward the hoop, the audience at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium suddenly hushed. These were the final minutes of the Women’s Professional Basketball League’s All-Star Game on Feb. 9, 1981, where an undersized squad from the West was blowing out the fa...

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22 Feb 19:33 • Sabrina Imbler

Finally! An Ancient Fish That Understood Life’s Terrors

The Cambrian period is most famously remembered as an era of biological experimentation, with bizarre creatures such as Hallucigenia, whose body resembled anti-bird spikes, and Wiwaxia, which looked like a medieval flail come to life. But the Cambrian should also be remember...

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22 Feb 18:15 • Sabrina Imbler

It’s Time To Get Cozy At The Podium

It is the end of your Winter Olympics event. You have crossed the finish line, landed all your jumps, or done whatever sporting melange comprises the biathalon or Nordic combined successfully enough to earn yourself a medal. Congratulations! But your body is feeling a little...

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22 Feb 17:36 • Lauren Theisen

Jack Hughes Sheds Blood And Teeth For His Country, U.S. Wins Olympic Gold

In the third period of Sunday's USA-Canada gold medal men's hockey game, the American forward Jack Hughes spit blood after he took a high stick to the mouth from Sam Bennett. The ensuing four-minute penalty didn't lead to a U.S. goal to break the 1-1 deadlock, but less than ...

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22 Feb 16:30 • Lauren Theisen

Mikhail Shaidorov Celebrated Gold By Skating In A Panda Suit

The NBC Saturday primetime broadcast used the figure skating exhibition gala as a way to provide a curtain call for their appointed Olympic protagonists. Of the five segments they aired from the event, four of them put Americans in the spotlight. Amber Glenn gave a fierce pe...

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20 Feb 22:42 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Still Country For Old Women

Megan Keller was a 21-year-old next-big-thing-on-defense when she won her first Olympic gold medal, in Pyeongchang, the winter before her senior year of college. She was also very nearly the reason her team lost it. The refs whistled her for an illegal hit on Canadian captai...

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20 Feb 18:45 • Harry Krinsky

Rich Paul’s Podcast Was Built To Be Useless

Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports and active NBA agent, has drawn some ire this season for things he said on his new podcast called Game Over, which he cohosts with Max Kellerman. Anonymous members of the Lakers staff were reportedly mad at him for fake-trading Austin Reaves f...

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20 Feb 18:45 • Giri Nathan

Indian Skier Starts, Finishes Race

This morning Dave McKenna was observing, with great pride, that Ireland had won zero medals at the Winter Olympics—not sure that any added context will help a reader here—so I decided to check in on the status of India's squad. There were only two athletes, both skiers: one in alpine and the other in cross-country. More had been written about Arif Mohammad Khan, the alpine skier from Kashmir, and I soon encountered these curious sentences in his Wikipedia entry:

Khan’s expectation in Beijing was to ski and make it to the finish line.[7] Khan now has his eyes set on the 2026 Olympics.[8][9]

You do not often hear an Olympian's ambitions summarized as "make it to the finish line." Time to consult the 2022 men's slalom results to see if Khan had in fact achieved his goal:

Defector
20 Feb 18:45 • Patrick Dubuque

A Season For Hope

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Feb 18.

In his second collection of recollections and reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the physicist Richard Feynman begins his book with the following anecdote:

Defector
20 Feb 17:48 • Billy Haisley

Ohhhhhhhh, Arsenal

I have to come clean about something. For a while now, when writing about the state of the Premier League title race, I have treated an impending Arsenal coronation as basically a fait accompli. This has been in part an earnest reflection of my belief that the Gunners have t...

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20 Feb 15:12 • Kathryn Xu

Alysa Liu Is Untouchable

When athletes are said to thrive under pressure, that generally does not mean that they do not feel it. Rather, the common understanding is that athletes, or at least the great ones, are capable of taking pressure and turning it into fuel. That thermodynamic process is a par...

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20 Feb 14:39 • Ray Ratto

Team USA’s Gold Is Sweeter For The Struggle

The members of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team may not admit to this, but they needed to have the pants scared off them by Canada to give the whole gold medal exercise some badly needed historical context. They needed Hilary Knight's reaper-cheating goal with 2:04 left ...

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19 Feb 22:12 • Chris Thompson

Emerald Fennell Now Going Moor-To-Moor Trying To Shock People

"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte Brontë, in the introduction to a selection of Emily's poems published in 1850. Emily had died in 1848, and had not lived to see the publication of the second edition of Wuthering Heights, carefully revised by her older siste...

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19 Feb 21:09 • Giri Nathan

Kevin Durant Neither Confirms Nor Denies The Latest Burner Allegations

A series of posts and direct messages from the Twitter account @gethigher77 has been screenshotted, circulated, and attributed to Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant. The contents of those screenshots have been compiled here for your browsing ease. The messages from @gethigher...

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19 Feb 20:36 • David Roth

Across The Hog Line, With John Cullen

It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opac...

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19 Feb 19:33 • Patrick Redford

Maybe LaMelo Ball Shouldn’t Have A Driver’s License

On Wednesday afternoon, Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball smashed his custom camo Hummer into another car in downtown Charlotte. Video obtained by local news station WSOC shows a grey sedan entering an intersection, only for Ball's much larger, fast-moving vehicle to swerve in...

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19 Feb 17:48 • Veronica de Souza

Make It Nice: Curtains, Linens, And How To Figure Out What You Like

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have a curtain dilemma, replacements for “ratty” linens, and advice on how to figure out what you like. Aileen asks: My husband and I just upgraded our apartment here in Germany to one ...

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19 Feb 17:15 • Lauren Theisen

I Finally Understand This Tara Lipinski Commercial

The one and only you is the human forged by the path that only you are on. Facing the not-knowing, putting one foot in front of the other. She's not your trophies. Because our trophies sit on the shelf. It's the bonds we forge with one another that can guide us to what we're here to do, and to be who we are: the one and only you.

The one and only you is the human forged by the path that only you are on.

Facing the not-knowing, putting one foot in front of the other.

Defector
19 Feb 15:30 • Patrick Redford

Eileen Gu Will Never Be The Traitor JD Vance Wants Her To Be

On Thursday, a certain freestyle skier will clip her boots on and huck herself down the halfpipe in Livigno, to the feverish anticipation of fans in two countries. Though she was born in the United States and attends Stanford University, she represents and wins medals under ...

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19 Feb 14:40 • Barry Petchesky

Quinn Hughes Almost Smiled

I'm not sure I thought I'd ever see the day when an American hockey player who has only worked in Vancouver and St. Paul would be getting covered by E! News, or serve as the lure in catfishing attempts. Quinn Hughes, mainstream celebrity? What a world. Being the subject of m...

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19 Feb 14:40 • Lesley Ryder

All I Want Is A Women’s Hockey Broadcast That Talks About The Hockey

On Thursday, the U.S. women’s hockey team will take on Canada in a battle of the women’s hockey superpowers. Every single Olympic gold medal in the history of the sport has been won by one of these two countries. If you're rooting for the U.S., it means watching a team stack...

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18 Feb 21:57 • Billy Haisley

Soccer Racismo Sounds The Same Every Time

Just over midway through Tuesday's Champions League playoff between Benfica and Real Madrid, Vinícius struck one of the most beautiful goals of his career. In response to the strike, and to Vinícius's totally normal celebration of it, the incensed Lisbon crowd sent boos, wat...

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18 Feb 20:03 • Barry Petchesky

Canada Took A Czech Beating And Survived

Anything less than dominance would have been an upset, no matter the opponent. With NHLers at the Olympics, Team Canada had won 13 straight. They hadn't trailed in more than 800 consecutive minutes of game time. Czechia in the quarterfinals shouldn't have forced them to brea...