Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have messy boys, an awkward living room layout, and advice on shopping for a couch. As a special holiday bonus, I will show you my extremely ugly bathroom sink.

Joe asks:

This is what the Defector staff saw and enjoyed this year.

Eephus

The NFL has announced that Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf will be suspended for two games for an altercation with a Lions fan during Sunday's game. In the middle of the game, Metcalf walked over to where a fan in a blue wig was yelling things at him, grabbed the fan by his collar, and then bopped him on the face.

https://bsky.app/profile/nickbaumgardner.bsky.social/post/3majrrdk3uc26

Sabrina: Well, well, well. It’s the final Christmas movie Defector has decided to watch this year, and I simply can’t think of a less thrilling choice than Merv. What is Merv about? Technically speaking, Merv is about Merv, a dog whose human parents have just split up. The movie opens with Merv being transported between the homes of Russ (Charlie Cox) and Anna (Zooey Deschanel). Have any of you ever shared custody of a pet before?

Kelsey: I have not shared custody of a pet, no. And after watching Merv, I probably never would. 

The Detroit Pistons are the toast of the NBA (positive) two short years after being made into toast by the NBA. Not only are they on top of the Eastern Conference with the fifth-best net rating in the NBA, they are extremely fun and cool to watch. This week, we brought on Pistons expert and returning champion NBR guest Maitreyi Anantharaman to talk Pistons as well as the WNBA labor battle. She will be familiar to listeners and readers, though I must once again recommend her recent story on Ken Belson's book and the state of sports labor.

One of the less-invoked-but-still-annoying features of following sports is the idea that the future can be foretold based on a typically stunted review of the recent past. For the Kansas City Chiefs, it had been a debate among our louder pundit-o-blatherers about the state of their dynasty—specifically whether their bay window of glory had been reduced to a peephole.

Then the gods weighed in with the answer, with the subtlety of a sash window being slammed down on Andy Reid's tongue. And yes, we cleaned up that image in deference to the season.

Jake Paul has been begging to get his teeth knocked in for a long time. Anthony Joshua finally did just that to the boxing gadfly in the sixth round of Friday’s fiasco of a fight from Miami.

Actually, along with breaking a jaw and ending the bout, Joshua’s massive overhand right might have saved two careers. Before it landed, both he and Paul had spent the night damaging themselves reputationally to the point that their ring runs were likely on the ropes. 

Can you ask someone to “close your eyes and watch” something? Just how private does a conversation need to be in order to upgrade from speaking “privately” to “very privately”? What does it mean for a wild pigeon to be “essentially on life support”? These are some of the man...

The North Carolina Tar Heels, fresh off of the cataclysmic first season of the Bill Belichick era, have decided that what this program really needs is more notable old horndogs who used to be great at coaching football. In that spirit, the school has turned to Bobby Petrino.

Petrino is expected to be the new offensive coordinator for Belichick's Tar Heels, according to reports from ESPN and On3. This comes after the firing of Freddy Kitchens and other lackeys Belichick has thrown under the bus to make it seem like he is planning to change things around. Petrino spent most of the past season as interim head coach for Arkansas, a return to glory after his infamous horndoggery-related 2012 firing from the school. The glory was short-lived, though, as the team went winless the rest of the season.

Bari Weiss, the little smirking suck-up that is presently editor-in-chief of CBS News, intervened at the last minute Sunday to spike a completed story, titled "Inside CECOT," that was scheduled to air on that evening's edition of 60 Minutes. The story, exposing conditions at...

Since we’ve no place to go, let’s solve the Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and Rachel Fabi, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a research scientist in Albany, Calif. Rachel is a bioethicist in Syracuse, N.Y. Together, they are the Fall 2025 Boswords Themeless League Champions, Stormy Division, Pairs.

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.

These are the sports moments from 2025 that the Defector staff enjoyed.

A’ja Wilson Hits A Game-Winner In Phoenix

With only three goals in his first 14 games, Connor McDavid looked like he might be having one of those years where he focuses more on setting up his teammates than scoring himself. He has these seasons from time to time, and there's nothing wrong with them—in '23–'24 he tallied a round 100 assists and finished third in MVP voting—but as McDavid's finite prime rolls on, it'd be pleasant to see him decide to take over games, like he used to when he was scoring 40 (or 64).

Well. About that. Since scoring three in 14, McDavid has scored 20 goals in his last 23 games, and 12 in his last 10. He is metaphorically turning on the jets, often by (also metaphorically) turning on the jets.

In Defector's 2025 annual report, our business guy Jasper Wang wrote, "When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 3...

Watch sports for long enough, and you will come to learn an ironclad yet vague rule: There are some things that a man simply cannot say to another man.

This law of dudehood is most often invoked by a player following a game in which there was a particularly spirited bout of shit-talking. One party will sometimes end up more aggrieved than the other in these circumstances, and it is when they are asked to explain their ire after the game that you can expect to encounter this particular talk about guy talk.

How much you will or won't enjoy the Caleb Williams experience depends almost entirely on the timing of your dosage. Catch him during one of those quarters when the Bears can't buy a first down and all Williams seems capable of doing is avoiding pressure and throwing the bal...

While the rest of the NBA's elite have distinguished themselves in a series of showcase games this month, Giannis Antetokounmpo has spent his December in a prison of his own making. The fourth-best player in the NBA has reached a dead end with the Milwaukee Bucks, yet neithe...

I was able to hold it together until I was alone, but I cried when I learned that the Mets had traded Mookie Wilson. This was at summer camp, so the news might have been days old by the time it finally made its way to me and alone time was decently hard to come by. I was 11,...

Tyrese Haliburton can only be a spectator to Indiana Pacers games this season, watching from the sidelines in outfits that make him look like an increasingly cool substitute teacher. Regardless, I have found myself thinking about his role on the so-very-almost NBA Champions ...

Tim. Tim Tim Tim Tim Tim Tim. You absolute moron. You absolute buffoon.

How long have you, Tim Saunders, been on the radio calling Flyers games? You've been doing it since 1997, which is basically 30 years. At any point in those 30 years did someone tell you that when the light is on, you are on the air? Did no one ever advise you to behave as if every microphone you ever encounter is on at all times? Seems like no, or we wouldn't be in this little situation now, would we?

Jake Paul’s finally doing what boxing fans have spent years clamoring for: fighting somebody who should beat his ass.

Tonight Paul gets in the ring with Anthony Joshua in Miami. On paper, like all Paul matchups, this fight shouldn’t even happen. Their faceoffs to hype the event have only made the bout seem as nonsensical as any of Paul’s other fights. Only this time Paul’s playing the bug to be squashed.

The Elite Ice Hockey League, the top level of hockey in the U.K., doesn't get a lot of big names. NHLers who have washed out of North America tend to head to the Continent: Sweden, Finland, Russia et al., all offer more money, better facilities, and a bigger spotlight for a ...

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.

When I first started ruminating on a video game series for Defector, I was playing Cyberpunk 2077. This wasn't a departure from my usual habits or some great coincidence, because I'd been returning to the game often since its 2020 release. (At the time of writing this, I am almost done with what will be my fourth lengthy playthrough of the game.) I have been fascinated with CD Projekt Red's follow-up to the world-conquering The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt since before it even existed. Given all of the hype, the delays, the embarrassing launch, and how much I'm still playing it deep into 2025, I think Cyberpunk 2077 has been the game I have thought about the most this decade.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: Last year when we did this, the assumption was that the committee would finagle thing...

In a way, it is heartening that I've never been good at the annual podcast tradition of Williams-Sonoma Catalog Price Is Right. This year marks my seventh attempt at it, with the only exception being the part of 2019 and 2020 in which I had neither jobs nor a podcast. I only do it once a year, and I am not otherwise in the market for ultra high-end espresso machine gewgaws or premium heat-and-eat hors d'oeuvres, but also seven times is a decent number of times to do something and absolutely suck at it roughly as bad each time. But as we kept reminding The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman, our guest for this year's edition, it's not a competition. It's more a formatted indictment of the current phase of capitalism we all inhabit with some guessing-game aspects.

The good news is that the Winnipeg Jets have their cornerstone goalie, Connor Hellebuyck, back in the lineup and apparently at full strength after missing a month due to knee surgery. The bad news is the Jets can't win any games no matter who's in net if they don't score goa...

Say at least this much for Matt Brown, writer of the college sports-focused Extra Points newsletter: He is a fair-minded guy. You can safely bestow unto him the Ceremonial Scepter of Good Duderdom. Tuesday, Brown learned that ESPN, the all-powerful behemoth astride sports me...

These are heady days for Arsenal fans. After three consecutive years as the Premier League's designated nearly men, the Gunners finally look poised to win the title, ending a dry spell that has lasted more than 20 years now. Though dominant domestic campaigns are often accom...

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.

Lemme tell you about this fucking dog. The shit I have been through with this dog, you wouldn’t believe. We got him as a Christmas gift for our kids nine years ago. Before that, our kids were like DOG DOG DOG DOG DOG! GIVE US A DOG! And I was like, “I got two jobs and three kids, and now you want me to add a dog to this pile of shit on my desk? No. No way. Let’s just get another fish and then watch it die.”

It's the most wonderful time of year, and we at Defector are proud to bring back our series discussing some of the most, uh, available holiday movies.

Sabrina Imbler: Thank you for joining me in watching the first and hopefully the last Christmas movie I’ve ever seen about a consulting firm. In our world, Santa relies on elves to determine whether children are good or bad. In the world of She’s Making a List, Santa has outsourced the naughty or nice lists to the Naughty or Nice Group, which relies on an algorithm to determine the inherent goodness and badness of children. Before we talk about the movie, I need to ask, what do you make of Santa's strategy?