It's nearly impossible to relay a single fact about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott that does not stop an unfamiliar recipient dead in their tracks. For example: She was suspended from baseball in 1993 for the repeated use of racial slurs, which included referrin...

The last real star in the universe will be a red dwarf. This will not be for some time yet. The conditions are ripe for stars to be formed, to live out their lives, to burn out or explode, in cycles for the next 100 trillion years. The universe is, then, unimaginably young,...

Post-apocalyptic comedies have not been in vogue since the notably less comic actual apocalypse has started filling our windscreens. Even moderately depraved cultural products like Survivor and Squid Game have stopped short of ritually killing and eating ...

As a soccer fan, one of the best things you can do for your physical and mental well-being is to studiously avoid overreacting to results early in the season. Especially for the big teams, and especially especially coming off of a summer international tournament, the first f...

San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York was arrested this weekend in Ohio, originally on the charge of engaging in prostitution, though a plea agreement amended it to misdemeanor charges.

York, who is originally from Youngstown, Ohio, was arrested Sunday morning at the Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community in East Palestine, according to local news station WKBN. The arrest was reportedly conducted by the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force as well as East Palestine police. By Monday morning, York had pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools.

According to Columbiana Court records, York was fined a total of $1,150 and sentenced to two days in Columbiana County Jail, concurrently, and received credit for one day already served. The 49ers owner had already filed a request to expunge the case from his record.

I can't help but empathize with the heirloom tomato this time of year. The first BLTs have been eaten; the novelty has worn off. Stacked on farmers' market tables like milk bottles in a carnival game, late-summer tomatoes start to look a little worse for wear. Like me, they ...

Some people are fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Philadelphia Eag—God, I’m exhausted just typing their name. Makes me wanna spit on a guy.

https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/1963761757760930233

Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok." If, in the years-long dark period when I had an agent but not yet a ...

Some of my favorite sports uniforms are red. This has always been true, and my choices of teams to support have only reinforced that. (A chicken-egg situation?) Other than the Miami Marlins (who did have the snazzy Sugar Kings red jerseys a few years back), the Miami Heat, N...

Imagine you are a horny male redback spider. You might be a small guy—a fraction of her size—but unlike some, you don't have a complex about it. You're just happy to be there, "there" meaning the haphazard snarl of a web of a female redback spider. Only 20 percent of male re...

Just shut up and solve our Monday crossword already. This week's puzzle was constructed by Owen Bergstein and Nick Dent, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Owen and Nick are longtime frenemies based in Boston. They met when Owen was a freshman in high school and Nick (aka...

I won't dispute that I once had red hair. Back in 2019, just for kicks, I went with a bright Hayley Williams–esque red that petered out for obvious reasons the following year. Then in 2025, with a 30th birthday and a big trip on the horizon, I decided to freshen up my look w...

For as long as baseball’s All-Star Game has been played—almost every year since 1933, including twice a year from 1959 to 1962—it’s been the ultimate in wish fulfillment for fans. Want to see a team of future Hall of Famers playing together? It’s got that. Want to see your favorite local players honored on a national stage? It’s possible. Poignant curtain calls and unexpected comedy? You bet.

But actual fan participation in selecting All-Star teams? That’s been a rockier road.

In this generation, when baseball fans are inundated with emails and in-stadium announcements encouraging All-Star Game voting, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t always the case. But after the first game in 1933 featured fan voting, team selections were done briefly by player vote and then entirely by managers. 

Gaze into the eyes of Comrade Redlegs, and let the truth of the situation wash over you: It’s Reds Week. That’s right. You may have survived Senators Week, Rays Week, Wings Week, and Bills Week—but do you have what it takes to journey with us into our latest theme week? Over the next five days,…

There are a number of very obvious reasons why Cleveland Browns fans might boo Deshaun Watson, all of which are a matter of public record and none of which Watson can really afford to concern himself with. It is a requirement of his extremely difficult job that Watson must m...

The Seattle Mariners have reached the stage of a busted season where they are just hunting around for reasons to smile. This was a 90-win team last season, one that came within a George Springer dinger of advancing to the franchise's first ever World Series. Now they are cru...

It's August, you know the drill: Frances Tiafoe's tennis season is just getting started. North American hard court summer is his wake-up. I once asked him if he could figure out how to bottle up the confidence of playing on home turf and tap into it elsewhere on tour, and hi...

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Los Angeles Chargers.

https://twitter.com/ChargersCountry/status/2086143238252183978

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.

It's almost fall! School is back in session and football is just about back. The 2026 college football season will be here next week, and the sport is as chaotic as ever. NIL money is flying, coaches are forever off their rockers, and the NCAA is holding on for dear life to a system that is crumbling in real time. The offseason has provided its own drama, in between transfer portal chicanery and recruiting violations. In the run-up to Week 0, we wanted to go over some of our favorite stories of the offseason, as a sort of pre-preview of things to know about and keep an eye on ahead of the upcoming season.

Lane Kiffin Watch

People sometimes wonder what editors do. It's a fair question to ask, given how difficult it is to read a column or blog post and be able to discern exactly how much influence an editor did or did not have over the final product. It's easy to assume that editors don't do muc...

Before Tadej Pogacar became a hypertuned killer on a bike, before he won any of his record-tying five Tours de France, before he was able to push the boundaries of the volume and variety of races that any single rider could win, he first had to break through. He did so seven...

It feels like the World Cup just ended, and yet somehow, some way, the Premier League is already back. England's top flight kicks off on Friday with defending champi—oops, I mean attacking champion; sorry Mikel—Arsenal taking on newly promoted Championship champion Coventry ...

It’s been a summer of bad news for anybody with favorable feelings (me!) about Texas Tech. The New York Times joined the pig pile this week with a feature story whose subhead said the school had become a “a dystopian academic nightmare.” As if this year’s athletics debacles ...

Some people are fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Ctrl-V.

Talk about a load-bearing hyphen. After a half-season of half-threatened retirement and full-frenzy speculation, the status quo simply continues: As the Formula 1 summer break comes to a close, Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen announced before Verstappen's home race that h...

I don't get nervous before recording episodes of The Distraction, and was surprised to notice during our more recent live episodes that even the usual bite of anxiety which comes with going onstage was just a fairly mild nibble. Some of this is because Drew does a lot of the...

In a kinder world, WNBA expansion teams are allowed to flail and muck about in peace for a few years before anyone pays close attention to them. But this is an unkind world, one that finds the Golden State Valkyries second in the standings and headed to the playoffs for the ...

We had moderate hopes for Tugboat Wilkinson in his major-league debut, just because his nickname and carriage merge so harmoniously. But because the San Francisco Giants clearly hate all of you, we didn't get nearly enough tug, or boat.

Wilkinson, whose real name is Matt, is only the second Tugboat in major league history after Thurman Munson, and he comes by his nickname with the fullest honesty. He is listed at 6-foot-1, 250 pounds, and has the front porch to suggest that the second number may be only an estimate, but that's not the hook. It's not even the fact that his best pitch has the 1934-styled nickname "invisiball." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2U7x_w7_k

Olivia Miles made her first bucket of Wednesday night's game against the Golden State Valkyries early in the first quarter. It was a pull-up jumper from the left elbow, and the broadcast camera zoomed in on her face as she backpedaled down the court. After a moment of though...

Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: