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Defector
07 Jul 20:57 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Atlanta Dream Are Getting Drowsy

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't pani...

Defector
07 Jul 19:57 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Lionel Messi Refuses To Let Time Win

For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round of 16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anythin...

Defector
07 Jul 19:30 • Drew Magary

The Hot Take Industrial Complex Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Means

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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more.

Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business.

Your letters:

Defector
07 Jul 18:54 • Sohini Desai

Meet The Broadway Actor Teaching Public Defenders How To Win In Court

On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at The Defenders Academy—a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court.

Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a court room has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her back to sharing her talents with public defenders. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Defector
07 Jul 17:48 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Paraguayan Senator Gets Shockingly Racist Toward Kylian Mbappé

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound; players are probably le...

Defector
07 Jul 16:54 • Albert Burneko

Is It Mitch McConnell Or Your Own Sense Of Possibility That Has Been Dead For Weeks

Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well now that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to...

Defector
07 Jul 16:42 • Sabrina Imbler

Plato’s Allegory Of The Crab

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and w...

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07 Jul 15:39 • Ray Ratto

It’s The Hype That Kills

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is. Well, in the wake of Monday night's dopeslap in Seattle, ...

Defector
07 Jul 15:39 • Sarah Borus

America’s Birthday, Brought To You By Gas Station Hoagies

Perhaps it's a sign from Mother Nature that the two flagship events of the Philadelphia's Wawa Welcome America Festival for the semiquincentennial were derailed by weather. Maybe she was telling us to stop this embarrassing exhibition of unbridled nationalism and look inward...

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07 Jul 13:36 • Tom Ley

The USMNT’s World Cup Exit Was Too Sad And Too Familiar

It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team ...

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06 Jul 17:36 • Lauren Theisen

MLB Is Now Promoting A Salary Cap Between Innings

You weren't watching MLB.TV on Sunday, because NBC bought out all of the day's games and locked most of them behind their billions-losing streaming service. But if you were tuned in for out-of-market baseball in the days prior, like I was, you may have been delivered an adve...

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06 Jul 16:48 • Patrick Redford

Gifts, Gritos, And A Breakthrough Win: An Afternoon With The Tour de France’s New And Jubilant Mexican Fanbase

BARCELONA — "Pogito! Hermano! Ya eres Mexicano!" sang the gathered dozens. Over an hour after Isaac del Toro won Stage 2 of the Tour de France, an enthusiastic knot of 40-ish tricolor-clad fans was still patiently at the barriers. Some came from Mexico, some lived in Barcelo...

Defector
06 Jul 16:21 • Chris Thompson

ESPN’s Matt Miller Investigated For Alleged Consumer Fraud While Recovering From Emergency Arm Amputation

Matt Miller, an on-air NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, is presently recovering from, among other injuries, the emergency amputation of his left arm. Probably there are not too many kinds of trouble in Miller's life that measure up against that one. But trouble is waiting, and no...

Defector
06 Jul 16:06 • Luis Paez-Pumar

The Folarin Balogun Red Card Brouhaha Is A Vintage FIFA Disaster

Just a day after FIFA rescind Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round of 16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, t...

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06 Jul 16:06 • Ray Ratto

Poor A’s Fans Can’t Even Get Properly Perfecto’d

If there could have been a story to rival England's Jordan Henderson getting yellow carded and then breaking his arm without actually playing, it would have been Brian Serven homering in the ninth inning of Marlins-Athletics to complete the comeback di tutti comebacks, and that's even allowing for the fact that England-Mexico at the Azteca was arguably a more momentous event than Marlins-Athletics no matter where it was played.

That it was played in West Sacramento just added to the mutant beauty of a day in which the Marlins...

... got seven innings of perfect pitching from Eury Pérez and provided him with a seemingly insurmountable 8-0 lead.

Defector
06 Jul 15:15 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, July 6: We’re Halfway There

Stay in line, and do our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Peggy Sue Marlin, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Peggy Sue works in systems and data automation and enjoys golfing and DIY projects. She won her school spelling bee on the word "cheeseburger," then w...

Defector
06 Jul 15:15 • Barry Petchesky

The Ducks Screwed Themselves

I think it's important we set some axioms for discussion of Anaheim's Leo Carlsson signing an offer sheet with Philadelphia, because it helps a superficially mindblowing contract feel something closer to logical—both in that the Flyers were wise to offer it, and in that the ...

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06 Jul 13:12 • Tom Ley

That’s Why This Shit Rules

Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped The Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness ...

Defector
05 Jul 21:21 • Kathryn Xu

Banger British Grand Prix Ends With A Whimper

Perhaps I can at least thank Max Verstappen for the clarity. Before he ran his Red Bull car into the wall on the 49th of the Silverstone Circuit's 52 laps, the British Grand Prix was shaping up to be too exciting to be coherent. It got off to an uncharacteristically slow sta...

Defector
05 Jul 20:09 • Billy Haisley

FIFA Makes Good And Right And Not At All Corrupt Decision To Rescind Folarin Balogun’s Red Card Suspension

The USMNT was the talk of the soccer world in the aftermath of its triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina last Wednesday. Most of the conversation was about the latest amazing U.S. performance in a tournament full of them, and the growing consensus that the Americans should be ...

Defector
05 Jul 16:30 • Kathryn Xu

A Shockingly Positive Review Of World Cup Public Transit In Los Angeles

Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of "public" and "transit," ...

Defector
05 Jul 14:27 • Patrick Redford

Jonas Vingegaard Made It Out Alive, Then Made Barcelona Smile

BARCELONA — "Every swarm needs a face," declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike's new bee mascot, "and every face needs a name." Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was ...

Defector
03 Jul 18:12 • Nicholas Russell

Darren Aronofsky’s AI Videos Are A Fitting Tribute To America, I Guess

Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video mo...

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03 Jul 15:54 • Israel Daramola

25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a ...

Defector
03 Jul 15:54 • Tom Ley

Try To Cool Off In The July 4th Weekend Open Thread

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.

Defector
03 Jul 15:54 • Owen Lewis

‘The Final Set’ Tells The Story Of Tennis’ Greatest Rivalry Becoming A Friendship

There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set, a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: o...

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02 Jul 17:48 • Patrick Redford

Your Guide To The 2026 Tour de France

Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France whil...

Defector
02 Jul 17:21 • A. Frog

The Passion According To A. Frog

Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to unde...

Defector
02 Jul 17:06 • Ray Ratto

Belgium Cannot Be Understood By The Pedestrian Soccer Mind

It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgia...

Defector
02 Jul 16:45 • Sohini Desai

Unlike The Defendants, One Of The Prairieland Judges Is Part Of An Organized Cell of Extremists

Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer ...