"People were writing poems," Patricia Lockwood tells us. Also: "People brought you cabbages." In her hands, events don't unfold in the usual way, with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, we seem to come upon people and things doing what they always do, their actions and g...

The Chiefs are no longer getting away with it, and maybe the Eagles aren't either. The defending Super Bowl champs are still leading the NFC East with an 8-5 record, but anyone who has watched this team closely will be forced to admit that the eternally pessimistic Eagles fans have a point this time—something is clearly not right here.

The Eagles lost their third straight game on Monday night, dropping a 22–19 overtime snoozer to the Chargers. Pretty much everyone who participated in this game came out of it embarrassed, but none more so than Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who this morning finds himself the personification of everything that has felt lacking about this Eagles' season.

Sunday was bittersweet for Buffalo Bills fans. Yes, Buffalo rallied in thrilling fashion to beat the Bengals with three fourth-quarter touchdowns, and the snow made for a festive atmosphere. But there must’ve also been some tears in the crowd too, because this was the last h...

The video of any great goal is a rich text that offers the viewer countless details to plunge into and enjoy. One of my favorite aspects are the players' reactions. There's so much to read into the body language of a scorer and their teammates after the ball hits the net: th...

It is once again time to get mad about a college football playoff bracket. Every year ESPN and its TV show, made by a committee that talks ball while on break from planning the human instrumentality project, design a 12-team playoff seemingly beholden to no rules, no standar...

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the start of the War on Terror. The totalizing and disastrous effects of American intervention in the Middle East followed a familiar trajectory: righteous vengeance and prolonged victimhood; creeping guilt and doubt about the...

The Baseball Hall Of Fame in its principal role as the parent company of BondsBeGone International has concluded at long last that the pretense of considering Barry Bonds is no longer worth the bother. In electing Jeff Kent (and good for him, I guess) while banishing Bonds, ...

Treat yourself to our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Aidan Deshong, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Aidan is a college student originally from Los Angeles. He isn’t a huge sports fan, except for golf, which he thinks is the best thing ever. (Crosswords are a close second.)

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 last time I wrote about the Colts, it was following last year's season-ending fumble/trick-play-meltdown combo that took them out of the playoff picture for good, and I promised you that "this will be the last time you have to think about the Colts this year." I secretly...

Plan the parade. Kiss your sweetie on the mouth. Send a local street urchin to acquire a goose for the feast. The Chiefs' bullshit is no longer working.

For a little while, it looked like the Chiefs' bullshit was still working. An 0-2 start was an encouraging sign for those of us who do not want devilry to enter into their sports-watching experience. But then the Chiefs won five of their next six games, all by comfortable margins, and doom was once again on the horizon. The possibility of this stupid, boring, under-achieving team Mr. Magoo-ing its way into another Super Bowl was real. Things have shifted dramatically since then, however, and the Chiefs are now 6-7 following last night's 20-10 loss to the Houston Texans, by far their most dispiriting of the season.

Well, Notre Dame sure showed the Pop-Tarts Bowl, by cracky. If they can't be in the big-money tournament, by gum, they're not going to lose money playing straight men to a gigantic breakfast side dish.

In fairness, we only assume they would have gone to the Pop-Tarts Bowl because that's where BYU, another rejected suitor for the college football playoff, ended up. But let's be fair. It could have been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Tony The Tiger Sun Bowl, the Kinder's Texas Bowl, the Wasabi Fenway Bowl, or the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl brought to you by Dre and Snoop Gin And Juice. There isn't a condiment, a barbecue sauce, a high-sugar cereal or high-sodium smack cracker, or a hangover kit in a can that wouldn't be proud to have Notre Dame on its billboards.

In the end, Lando Norris held his nerve, and his lead. Three drivers came into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a chance to win the championship, but it was Norris who did exactly what he needed to: a podium would guarantee a championship win, and a podium he achieved. He beat ...

Figure skating is a fundamentally cruel sport. A full regular season or tournament structure gives top athletes a bulwark against variance. But a figure skater's biggest competition comes only every four years; over the course of a single year, they will, if they are fortuna...

The Indiana Hoosiers are the last undefeated team in college football, and will have the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff thanks to their 13-10 win over Ohio State in last night's Big Ten Championship Game. Anyone waiting for Indiana's dream season to end will have to wait a little longer.

Winning a conference title may not mean as much as it used to in the pre-playoff era, but try telling that to anyone associated with this team, which has only two conference titles in its entire history, the most recent coming in 1967. And 13-10 may not be the scoreline anyone wants to see in a matchup between the top two teams in the country, but try telling that to Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who won the game with the throw of the season and then gave an all-time great postgame interview.

Liverpool's horrible season got worse on two different fronts on Saturday. The day started with the Reds coughing up a 2-0 lead against relegation battler Leeds United, ultimately drawing 3–3 with yet another fragile performance. It ended with club icon Mo Salah absolutely torching his manager during an impromptu postgame press conference.

Salah has been on Liverpool's bench for the last three games, only earning a 45-minute cameo during a 1–1 draw against Sunderland. Standing in front of a gaggle of reporters, Salah said that he's been made a scapegoat by the club, that he no longer has a relationship with manager Arne Slot, and that his time at Liverpool may well be coming to an end this winter.

I started going back to the 1970s last winter because I was convinced everything and everyone else was, too. This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal y...

On Friday, after an interminable procession of songs, skits, interviews, and speeches, including Donald Trump accepting a knock-off Peace Prize, FIFA's 2026 World Cup draw ceremony finally did the only thing anyone actually cared about. (If that sentence sounds somewhat familiar, there's a reason, and it's that FIFA has unfortunately settled on a bloated format for the draw, made only more bloated by the sheer Americanness of this edition.) With just over six months until the start of the tournament, and with six spots still left to be decided by various playoffs in March, the general skeleton of the first 48-team World Cup has been sorted out. Here it is:

https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/1997020788864721278

The passage of time remains undefeated: LeBron James's double-digit scoring streak is over. James's run of putting up 10 or more points in every game since Jan. 5, 2007—George W. Bush was the president! The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't even exist yet!—is not one of the ...

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: It’s conference championship weekend … a thing that matters! Right? There are rematch...

Throughout the first season of The Chair Company, the protagonist Ron Trosper (Tim Robinson) goes to many places that he should not. He chases unsettling men and curious leads through parking lots, dingy apartment buildings, hoarder houses, government records offices, strip-...

In Hal Hartley’s new film Where to Land, a 58-year-old director of romantic comedies applies to become a groundskeeper at a graveyard. The director, played by frequent Hartley collaborator Bill Sage, is putting together his last will and testament, taking stock of his life i...

It is a strangely nice thing that putting up a post containing the link to that week's episode of The Distraction has become part of my Thanksgiving observance. Most of it still amounts to going up and down the stairs of my parents' home, and doing hours of oafish expediting and cooking in their kitchen while everyone in my family yells "What?" at each other from different rooms. But we've been doing this long enough that the collision between the undisputed king of Thursday holidays and our podcast, which comes out on Thursdays, barely even registers as jarring anymore. It wasn't until this week, after all that cooking and eating and a hard-won 10 hours of sleep, when the podcast really felt as if it was getting back to normal. We talked about climate change, the NBA, and fantasy sandwiches.

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. The first movie in our lineup is Jingle Bell Heist, a Netflix movie about the magic of robbing the rich and experimental stem cell therapy. This week, we are joined by a very special guest: Leigh McKenna.

Leigh McKenna: Hi, Sabrina. This is Leigh. We are here.

Warner Bros. Discovery is for sale. The family that just made Bari Weiss one of the most powerful people in American journalism is doing everything it can to buy it.

The entertainment conglomerate, formed three years ago when Warner Media spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery, Inc., announced plans this past summer to split back into two separate companies. Its functional studio and streaming arm, the source of the publicly traded company's value as a security, would thus be unshackled from its network TV business, which still generates a ton of cash but is a declining in value (as evinced by WBD's $9 billion write-down of its TV properties). The new TV company would also be a place for WBD to park its $38 billion debt load. WBD followed Comcast's lead in the matter, and at the time of the announcement claimed it would complete the process by mid-2026.

Big holiday news: If you buy an annual gift subscription to Defector or Normal Gossip before the end of December 2025, we’ll comp you a gift subscription to your choice of a participating site on the Lede platform. You can enjoy this second subscription yourself, or you can turn around and re-gift it. Five of…

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.

A few weeks ago I called my best friend Howard to chat on the phone. Howard and his wife just had their first kid, so I was checking in on the new parents, and on my spiritual nephew. I was gonna ask all of the usual questions. Is the baby sleeping well? Is the baby eating? Have you wanted to punch the baby yet because it wouldn’t stop screaming? But I never got a chance to go through my little rundown, because I’d called my man at the wrong time of day.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. After working in music journalism for over 10 years, if there's one thing I've come away feeling it's a true hatred for making lists. The very process of having to pick 10...

The Oklahoma City Thunder are 21-1 and the prohibitive favorite to repeat as NBA champions this year; they also might improve dramatically this offseason. That is because the Thunder own outright the Los Angeles Clippers' first-round pick in the 2026 draft. The dark provenan...

By now, you have probably heard about Train Dreams. Since premiering this past January at Sundance, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella has been lauded by critics, screened at various film festivals, and purchased by Netflix. You may have heard that it is...

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have commissioned a 10-part docuseries on themselves and Amazon Prime has agreed to air it, starting on December 11. Even by the debased standards that apply to vanity sports documentaries, the question of "why" springs immediatel...