FeedCity: Defector

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13 Feb 15:18 • Rena Behar

The Outdoor Industry Needs Workers, And Workers Need Unions

Work in the outdoor industry long enough, and you’ll learn that only certain jobs in the U.S. are allowed to be taken seriously. Spending your days emailing about nothing is a “career.” Drafting slogans to feed the AI machine? Impressive. Combining the abilities of an EMT, c...

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12 Feb 20:33 • David Roth

Choosing Your Pomeranian, With Kathryn Xu

Because last week was such a sad and difficult and busy one for us at the site, and also for the broader world in the way that things have been sad/difficult for some time now, I didn't get around to reading the stellar team coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show t...

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12 Feb 20:00 • Patrick Redford

Famous Clients Bail On Casey Wasserman Over Gross Sex Emails To Ghislaine Maxwell

While the world's attention is currently focused on the various performances, admissions of infidelity, and blood-soaked mascots of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, the guy running the next Summer Olympics is coming under intense pressure for popping up in the latest tranc...

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12 Feb 19:03 • Kathryn Xu

Ukrainian Skeleton Slider Banned From Competition Over Helmet Honoring Athletes Killed By Russia

One hour before the start of the men's skeleton event, Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from participating, after insisting on wearing a helmet with illustrations of Ukrainian athletes and coaches who were killed in the war following Russia's 2022 inva...

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12 Feb 18:42 • Sabrina Imbler

High-Level, Actionable Insights From Watching Doubles Luge For The First Time

To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this opinion is wrong. Luge requires athleticism and dexterity, the ability to st...

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12 Feb 16:54 • Ray Ratto

The NBA Could Really Use A Break

Because everyone else at Industrial Foundry No. 682 is basking in the joys of publicly libidinous biathletes and their subtly vengeful exes, snow-runners with nuclear quad muscles, credit card-kiting biathletes, deeply sinister ice dancers, free...

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12 Feb 15:36 • Barry Petchesky

Damian Clara Was Italy’s Improbable Bastion

The Olympic spirit takes a few forms. There's total dominance, as the best athletes in the world display their mastery. There's the unlikely upset, when deep underdogs overcome the odds. And then there's the Olympians with no chance in hell. The ones who are outclassed, outm...

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12 Feb 15:06 • Billy Haisley

There Are No Good Teams In The Premier League

How many Premier League teams would you say are super happy with their season so far? I'd put the number at three. First there's Arsenal, which, aesthetic qualms aside, has to be giddy about its prospects of breaking the duck and winning the title. Then there's Aston Villa, ...

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11 Feb 21:18 • Kathryn Xu

Ilia Malinin Brings Figure Skating To The Crossroads

Even in sports that do not literally hand out points for style, the matter of aesthetic value is of discursive import. The most dominant athlete or team in the world can be taken down a peg or two on the moral underpinnings of play style. There are hoops (ethical) and hoops ...

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11 Feb 20:21 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Team USA’s Speedy Children Delivered A Beatdown Of Canada

If every instinct the U.S. women's hockey team had at the 2022 Olympics was wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. On Tuesday, in their round-robin meeting at the Olympics, the Americans celebrated a 5-0 win over Canada, the sort of thorough beatdown atypical of th...

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11 Feb 19:33 • Brandy Jensen

Adulterous Norwegian Biathlete’s Appeal Denied

It is so easy to yield to temptation. My head might know a path leads only to shame and regret, but my heart urges me to take one step, and then another. It started on Tuesday, with news that Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid chose, for some reason, to use the occasion...

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11 Feb 18:33 • Patrick Redford

Johannes Klæbo Ran Everybody Off The Course

Televisually speaking, my one complaint about the Winter Olympics is that even with expert commentary, the skills on display in many events are not so obviously different from one another that I can tell them apart. I cannot tell any trick that anyone on skis or a snowboard does from any other trick that anyone else does; I have to take Johnny Weir's word for what is an axel vs. what is a salchow; and watching ski jumping is like looking at a painting. But when it comes to Johannes Klæbo, perhaps the best athlete at these Games, it is hilariously obvious that no other cross-country skier can touch him.

For one, he's up there, while his competitors are back there, but more relevant to our purposes, he can pound out the pace on skis in a way that nobody else can. Look at this man go.

https://youtu.be/bXDTrg52LIM?si=hpfoH4fDurHhMP8y&t=157

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11 Feb 17:12 • Lauren Theisen

The Tigers Need More Than Nostalgia From Justin Verlander

Huge breaking news in Detroit on Tuesday: The Tigers came to a deal with a multi-time Cy Young winner universally beloved by fans. No, not Tarik Skubal, who's still due to become a free agent after this season. Nearly a decade since he was traded to the Astros, Justin Verlan...

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11 Feb 17:12 • Patrick Redford

On The Breathtakingly Cynical Giannis Antetokounmpo Kalshi Investment

This week on Nothing But Respect, we are covering the trade deadline in a very characteristic way, by which I course mean we spent most of the episode talking about Giannis Antetokounmpo's Kalshi investment, prediction markets, and the increasingly fractured and incoherent ways the sport is consumed and talked about. In other words, we went back to the well. Harry also talked about the influencer Clavicular and this Sam Kriss essay on him as a way to segue into Zach LaVine and the matter of the small-batch tank job happening in Sacramento.

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

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11 Feb 16:37 • Ray Ratto

Sam Darnold’s Super Bowl Tax Bill Is A Total Write-Off

If we are to take stories first from Sportico's Michael McCann and Robert Raiola and later Forbes' Nathan Goldman as actual factuals, and all involved have made their reputations on knowing the whatabouts and whereabouts of money, Sam Darnold's greatest moment as a professio...

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11 Feb 15:33 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

They Publish Books By “Women And Weirdos” In Their Free Time

Learning that you can just buy ISBNs is like learning that you can just walk into a high-end designer store and touch things. It seems like there should be a more rigorous process to filter out the grubby-fingered like me, but there isn’t. Apparently you can just buy ISBNs o...

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11 Feb 14:39 • Libby Watson

I Traveled 800 Miles To Eat Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza At Criss Angel’s Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza

When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but by focusing on America’s enormous size, its capacity to hold infinite diffe...

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10 Feb 19:01 • Patrick Redford

The Saga Of The French Teammate-Defrauder Taught Me To Appreciate The Essence Of Biathlon

To the layperson, biathlon may be the strangest sport in the Winter Olympics. Most of the sports in the Games involve athletes testing the limits of the human body vis-á-vis gravity (e.g.: big air, ski jumping), sliding (curling, speedskating), or gravity and sliding (figure...

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10 Feb 18:27 • Kelsey McKinney

Norwegian Biathlete, At Summit Of His Life’s Work: I Cheated On My Girlfriend

The biathlon encourages athletes to balance two things at once. A competitor must be able to ski a great distance at an immense speed, and then, as if turning off a light-switch, lower their heart rate, aim a gun, and shoot six tiny targets, before returning to skiing around...

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10 Feb 17:55 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Kim Caldwell Is Running Out Of Hard Truths To Deliver

Asked what advice she’d give Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell after the Lady Vols’ 93-50 loss to South Carolina on Sunday, a diplomatic Dawn Staley demurred: “I probably wouldn’t say it publicly.” That makes one! Caldwell, at her postgame press conference, had a lot to say ...

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10 Feb 17:55 • Drew Magary

The Real Highlight Of The Super Bowl Was Josh McDaniels Eating Shit

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 halls of fame, Chuck Klosterman, taxes, how to lose your virginity at...

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10 Feb 16:15 • Sabrina Imbler

Which Other Olympic Mascots Could Italian Stoats Tina And Milo Slaughter In Cold Blood?

Apologies to all otters, ferrets, badgers, ferret-badgers, weasels, fishers, polecats, wolverines, martens, and grisons, but the mustelid of the moment is the stoat. The mascots of the 2026 Winter Olympics are a pair of sibling stoats named Milo (short for Milano) and Tina (...

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10 Feb 15:33 • Chris Thompson

Pistons Pissed, Hornets Stung, Beef Stew Beefs, Too

Not so long ago, a contest against the Charlotte Hornets was not likely to meaningfully raise the heart rate of anyone on the opposing side. Maybe the sight of LaMelo Ball's unpleasant red tattoos would cause a moment's perturbation, but nothing acute, nothing to flush the f...

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10 Feb 15:33 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

Olympic Photographers: Stop Doing The Lugers Dirty

Imagine the training for the Olympics. All the work, all the anxiety, the parties missed, and the mornings you'd rather have spent in bed. The money spent on training, equipment, travel, all of it. You sacrifice so much because you are single-mindedly focused on becoming the best. You make it to the Olympics, where you represent your country on the international stage, and for one shining moment, all of the sacrifices seem worth it.

Now imagine that this is the photo of that moment that lives on in the collective memory in the form of your top Getty Images search result.

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10 Feb 14:39 • Diana Moskovitz

France’s Viral Ice Dancing Team Has A Dark Backstory

Blink and you might not have caught it. On Monday, Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry took to the rink and staked their claim to the ice dancing gold medal. Dancing to Madonna's "Vogue," complete with Blond Ambition–inspired costumes and voguing arms, ...

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09 Feb 20:57 • Luis Paez-Pumar

The Patriots Offensive Line Got Obliterated

There are many reasons why the Seattle Seahawks comfortably dispatched the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The Seahawks offense, led by Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III, was able to do enough against a very game Pats defense to never feel pressured into taking any ma...

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09 Feb 19:36 • Israel Daramola

Bad Bunny Celebrated America

The Super Bowl halftime show is a giant, overstuffed program that is about celebrating its own overstuffedness. It's a maximalist entertainment spectacle set in the middle of the most maximalist entertainment spectacle in sports, where football is stretched out over five hou...

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09 Feb 19:36 • Albert Burneko

The Super Bowl Could Not Compete With Tape-Delayed Olympic Curling

Nobody else in my house likes football, and we are believers in democracy at least as far as concerns the television. And so it was that, Sunday evening, I had the Super Bowl streaming on my li'l laptop screen, and the gigantic TV was showing a tape-delayed CNBC broadcast of...

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09 Feb 19:03 • Dave McKenna

Shitty Washington Post Publisher Loses Job After Skipping Out To The Super Bowl

Will Lewis, the stubbled bumbler brought in by Jeff Bezos to lay waste to the Washington Post, is gone. Lewis announced over the weekend that he was resigning as the newspaper’s CEO and publisher. But, mission accomplished! Not since King George III razed the White House has...

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09 Feb 19:03 • David Roth

It Feels Great, Dude

The history of professional football is long enough and strange enough to include a placekicker or two who had "a normal career." Theoretically. I have found scant evidence of that, but presumably there has been or could be a kicker that performed as a pro more or less in th...