It was a bonnie morning 410 million years ago in what are now the Rhynie chert fossil beds in Scotland. The mists had begun to lift and swirl over the landscape, where hot springs burbled, lichen papered over rocks, and worms slithered as only worms can. Here, almost all lif...

Hopefully you have not already heard, but the Charlotte Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the NBA. LaMelo Ball is for once an aptonym, Brandon Miller is playing like Paul George (laudatory) instead of playing like Paul George (derogatory), and Kon Knueppel is going nut...

NEW YORK — On day one of the Westminster Dog Show, the Westminster Kennel Club hosted a Judging Insider program, where longtime judge Michael Faulkner helpfully pulled back the curtain on what actually goes into judging dogs and bitches (a strict technical term in the dog sh...

Thanks to the eerie longevity of its recent greats, men's tennis has been preoccupied with endings over the last few years. It's all about legacy, the decision to retire, the tally of major titles once the rackets have been set down for good. All of it is almost a little mor...

In 2012, a self-published author of erotic Twilight fanfiction, whose books had gained a large fan base online, was offered a seven-figure contract by a major American publisher. E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would become the three bestselling titles of the 2010s...

NEW YORK — People are talking about boxing again! Sure, it took a guy getting his hairpiece punched off his head to do it, but why complain?

Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, 317-pound heavyweight Jarrell Miller got hit so hard his hair fell off. No, not figuratively. Miller's hairpiece was actually loosened up by the force of a straight left to the face he took from his 288-pound opponent, Kingsley Ibeh, with about a minute left in the second round. Then a quick and equally stout Ibeh right got his head rug flapping. The poor pelt peeled back farther during some infighting between the big lugs and an exchange of blows as the round ended. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dky36nkTh8

Wake up: It's time to solve the Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and Kelsey Dixon, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a crossword constructor from the Bay Area, and Kelsey is a crossword constructor from Chicago. They both lived in Atlanta in the '90s, which is why Kelsey has been trying to start a rumor that Rebecca was her childhood babysitter. They hope you don't take the puzzle too seriously!

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. 

The Minnesota Vikings fired general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in the middle of the day on Friday. The timing of the move was curious, given that Minnesota’s season ended nearly a month ago and that Adofo-Mensah, right up until the moment of his ouster, was conducting busine...

The World Baseball Classic, gearing up for its sixth iteration, is still trying to find its footing as a true, best-on-best international tournament. It wants to be the FIFA World Cup, but everything wants to be the World Cup and nothing is besides the World Cup. It would pr...

During an all-hands meeting with CBS News staffers last week, editor-in-chief Bari Weiss attempted to lay out a bold new vision for the network. She encouraged her staff to think of the decades-old TV news operation as a "start-up," and to prioritize "scoops of ideas," "scoo...

Life is what you make it. Attitude. It snowed a week ago in New York City, but it hasn’t warmed up since then, so the dirty snow piles are still stacked along the sidewalks. Even in Midtown, commuters have to line up at corners and walk single file through narrow paths clear...

I started reading James Baldwin in college, as a politically curious renegade-in-training. What appealed to me was his deeply philosophical outlook on race in America, the beauty of his prose, and how he brought it all to bear in his writing about the pop culture of his day....

The United States Department of Justice on Friday released another batch of files from its investigation into sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Included in these latest files are several emails between Epstein and New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, in which Epstein appeared to be scouting girls for Tisch.

Like a lot of the sad, old rich men who ended up Epstein's orbit, Tisch seems to have reached out to the infamous sex criminal for romantic assistance. All of the emails between Tisch and Epstein that were released in this batch of documents were sent in 2013, when Tisch was 63 years old, and five years after Epstein pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges.

On April 26, 2013, Tisch wrote an email to Epstein with a subject line of "Ukrainian Girl":

We interrupt our ongoing tribute to Comrade McQuade to provide a score from last night: The Philadelphia 76ers defeated the Sacramento Kings, in Philadelphia, by the deeply mockable score of 113-111. Tyrese Maxey's give-and-go and-1 layup with 1.3 seconds left was the denouement to what looked for much of the second half like an embarrassing loss to the team with the league's worst record, and which happened also to be in the throes of a seven-game losing streak.

But the end of the game was not the highlight. In fact, the game itself was not much of a highlight either. It was this.

https://bsky.app/profile/cjzero.bsky.social/post/3mdlzdcm5b22z

Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his diagnosis hit all of us hard, but Dan never lost his enthusiasm or his spirit. Some of…

The Tour Down Under loves its kangaroo iconography. Any given cycling season only truly begins once everyone gets to see images of star riders holding little baby joeys, and the first WorldTour race of the season also features a kangaroo as its mascot (Oppy, per the TDU, "re...

This isn't the finale we imagined for season nine, but as 2025 and 2026 have illustrated, time will keep passing and things will keep changing regardless of our little plans. Just like everyone else right now we learned all the ways we can adapt when everything starts to get a little chaotic.

This week's episode is a little different from most. Instead of bringing you a new story Rachelle and Se’era sat down to talk about what it's been like to work on the show over the course of the past year and what it means to produce a podcast about gossip when it feels like the world is on fire. Fear not! We also came prepared with some morsels of gossip shared by listeners just to help sustain y’all through the break. See you this summer for season ten! 

If Bill Belichick was willing to play to type today, he would rise in Uppermost Dudgeon—it's a suburb of Foxborough—and say he doesn't want to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at all, won't accept induction when it does come, and would attend the ceremony only for...

Every day, up and down the culture, unjust things are happening. Terrible things happen to good people, while some of the most vile people this country has ever produced blithely escape any accountability for their actions and go on cutting the line. It is all wrong, and if ...

Lindsey Graham has been on a mission from God. The senator from South Carolina said on Jan. 15 that he would take a spontaneous trip to Israel, less than a month after his visit to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Mike Huckabee to discuss the purpor...

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 Sam Darnold, fighting ICE, conditioner, and more.

Your letters:

Paul:

The first distinguishing characteristic of the Varsity Blues scandal is that it's extremely funny: a bunch of rich parents paid a guy to photoshop their underachieving children into athletic scenarios they were not skilled enough to earn as part of a baroque scheme to get th...

Mixed doubles curling is the sport I'm most looking forward to across all of the Olympics. The competition is a lengthy journey that rewards close attention, but I also believe it's one of the best newcomer-friendly events of the entire Games. Even if you don't know anyone a...

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect has been a long time coming. When Harry and I began working on the show, we came up with a list of dream episodes, standalone topics that we wanted to get to at some point, guests that we thought would be somewhat tricky to get but ...

Have you heard the news? British director Emerald Fennell is making Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic loved by depressed and horny girls everywhere.

Or, more precisely, she is making "Wuthering Heights," because, as she explained in a recent interview, "it is Wuthering Heights and it isn’t—but really I'd say that any adaptation of a novel should have quotation marks around it." Well, OK!

Since it's Emerald Fennell, the movie is sure to have some weird sex stuff going on. Also, since it's Emerald Fennell, the movie will probably be bad. Either way, in anticipation of its release we have decided to read (or, in some cases, reread) the 1847 novel. Please join us as we engage in some turbulent yearning on the Yorkshire moors.

NFL rumor pixies Dianna Russini and Adam Schefter are on the record as saying that there may not be any NFL head coaching openings by Wednesday. Given that Wednesday is still scheduled for tomorrow, this means that one of the league's most vexing employment riddles should fi...

During last summer's NBA Finals, a fully AI-generated commercial featuring people in man-on-the-street interviews yelling towards the camera about all the things they were going to bet on (football games, the price of eggs, hurricanes, alien visitations) introduced the world to Kalshi. Tagline: "The world’s gone mad, trade on it." The ad was made by “AI filmmaker” PJ Ace, who wrote a brief outline of the concept and then had ChatGPT convert it into a more detailed prompt which he then fed into Google’s VEO 3 video generator:

The decision to rely on generative AI wasn’t about saving money—Kalshi is and was extremely well capitalized—but about flaunting a certain kind of trollish, accelerationist posture intended to locate their target audience—people on social media who are very certain about their ability to predict the future.

MELBOURNE — What they say is true: you watch less tennis when you cover a major tournament in person. I can tell you that 15 journalists piled into Sorana Cirstea’s press conference after her three-set loss to Naomi Osaka, which featured some celebration etiquette-related be...

The Washington Post’s suicide-by-1,000-cuts business plan is going swimmingly. Word of the most recent act of self-harm came with a New York Times report on Friday on an internal memo informing the staff that the Jeff Bezos regime had decided “not to send a contingent to the...

Because tennis is thinly disguised psychological torture, it is not a surprise when a tennis player looks like they are having a bad time. Even by those standards, Amanda Anisimova, while on court, wears her emotions on her sleeve; she can also look like she is wrangling wit...