Steph Curry's mere presence can mask so much mediocrity. As long as he's on court, the Golden State Warriors' offense crackles with possibility. The threat of Curry getting the ball with a few inches of space keeps any defense in permanent panic, and he is masterful at using...

The Detroit Lions and their fans have been on an emotional roller coaster over the past few days. Actually, the better amusement park ride for this metaphor might be a drop tower—it would more accurately convey how jarring and abrupt the changes in mood have been with this w...

For years, a rumor has floated around about the length of Willem Dafoe’s penis. Willem Dafoe’s penis is said to be extra-large. It is allegedly so big, in fact, that after filming nude scenes in the 2009 film Antichrist, Lars von Trier reported that he needed to re-shoot them using a different actor. “He has an enormous dick,” the director told The Boston Phoenix while promoting the film. “We had to take those scenes out of the film.” Here came the kicker: When Dafoe’s penis was on screen, said von Trier, “everybody got very confused when they saw it”.

What this means is that somewhere out there lives a humble man whose penis stood in for Willem Dafoe’s. Who is he?

Daniel Slosberg is the Tom Joad of Diana Nyad’s bullshitting. Whenever she’s out there beatin’ up the truth, he’ll be there. 

So Slosberg was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. earlier this month as town officials planted a plaque at Las Olas Beach to honor Nyad, a local kid who grew up to be as famous as any female American swimmer of the pre-Ledecky era. Slosberg says he hadn’t flown in 10 years, but when he heard that the woman who Slosberg calls “swimming’s greatest fraud,” was going to be commemorated by public servants, he had to get on a plane.

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry. The Assassin's Creed series is a bit of a blind spot for me. It wasn't always that way. I played the first...

It is Thanksgiving all across these United States, but it wasn't until last weekend that I really felt it. I can read a calendar, and the season's usual logistic and chore requirements were all right there where I could see them, but knowing that a favorite holiday is coming ...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The website will be a little sleepy for the next few days, so feel free to kick your feet up and relax in this open thread. Snacks are in the fridge!

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 while back, I got a reque...

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: We finally made it to the end of a knotty mess of a college football season. The...

In the fall of 2021, Renato Borras-Chavez, a marine mammal ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, spotted a leopard seal on an ice floe. Borras-Chavez was on a research expedition to a glacial fjord in Chile's Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, one of the places leopard seals take up residence outside of Antarctica. He was thrilled; this was the first leopard seal he'd ever seen in Chile, where he is from. As he peered through his binoculars, he noticed another, smaller seal: a pup. "I got so excited, and then we got there, and it's dead," he said.

Zohran Mamdani is weeks away from becoming Mayor of New York City. As someone who does not live in the city but nevertheless has a lot of opinions about what goes on there, I want his administration to be a success. This is why I was so disappointed by some of the Mayor-Elect's recent conduct, which raises new questions about whether Mr. Mamdani is truly prepared to be a Mayor who represents all New Yorkers.

During his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show this week, Mr. Mamdani, a devout Arsenal fan, took some time out of explaining his policy agenda to remember some Arsenal guys:

We learned in our reading yesterday that the Detroit Pistons are now a fully fledged power in the better-than-we-thought Eastern Conference, and well worth the notice both for what they've already accomplished and for the wonders that the exceedingly springy Jalen Duran works on his own.

It's a nice story told well, but also they are not the Oklahoma City Thunder. If they're much closer than most expected, the Pistons currently fall among the NBA's narrow tier of closest-but-not-that-close teams. The Thunder are threatening the most dangerous résumé in sports—that of the 2016 Golden State Warriors, the most mocked great team in NBA history.

I grew up with three brothers. Several canon events in the 90s shaped our dynamic to this day. There was a certain game of Risk. There was the day mom relinquished her Hi8 video camera to us with no strings attached. A bike accident here, a rock thrown down the stairs there....

On tiny Hornby Island northwest of Vancouver, after the Women’s World Cup in the summer of 2015, our bed-and-breakfast host was telling us about the town. The pizza place in the park is terrific, he said, but things get crowded during music nights on Wednesday and Sunday. “I...

This week on the show, Harry and I yapped about a number of different media-adjacent topics, basketball and otherwise. What began as a discussion of how we each follow the NBA turned into a much longer conversation about cutting-edge media in other spheres, namely, the daily...

The Detroit Pistons are the best team in the Eastern Conference and the hottest team in the NBA, which is probably not what anyone outside of the Mitten would have scried before this season began or after simply looking at the Games Played column on the team's Basketball Ref...

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 salad tossing, Iron Maiden, strutting at the gym, and more.

Your letters:

Before he'd even entered a legit NHL game, Logan Cooley made an exciting first impression on me. Playing a 2023 preseason contest in Melbourne for a team called the "Arizona Coyotes" (I guess that's some sort of Australian thing), Cooley flew into the attacking zone with thr...

The Phoenix Mercury have one of the best nicknames in sports. It's classical, referring to the Roman god of, among other things, travel, trickery, and luck. It's local, referring to fact that Phoenix is a monument to man's arrogance. And it is scientific, referring to one of...

Big news: Defector is looking to hire editorial interns for the summer of 2026. Wow! That could be you! How could it be you? I am here to answer that question, and many more. What will a Defector intern actually do? They will do what our previous interns have done: publish cool and interesting blogs. At Defector,…

For about a decade at Manchester United there have been too many organizational resets, false dawns, and moments of humiliation to count. Grab any slice of results from this era and you can tell pretty much whatever story you want about this club. Hey, United might be turnin...

The Charlotte Hornets are once again miserable crud. At 4–13, they are down there sloshing in the fermented trash juice of the Eastern Conference. The Hornets are perhaps a somewhat more buoyant grade of filth than the league's absolute worst teams—the Washington Wizards are...

All was well with the Philadelphia Eagles in the first half of Sunday's game. The defense looked dominant again. The offense, which had struggled in low-scoring wins the past two weeks, was churning again. The Dallas Cowboys’ first drive of the game ended on downs. Another s...

Apparently someone at MLB headquarters turned the stove on and accidentally left it going. On Sunday, ESPN's Jeff Passan reported that the Texas Rangers and New York Mets were finalizing a straight-up player swap of Marcus Semien for Brandon Nimmo. Semien will be taking his ...

If current trends continue, historians will look back on Nov. 2, 2025, with consternation and confusion. Entire careers of PhD candidates at major universities will be devoted to the mystery of this one day. There will be theses and dissertations, essays and thinkpieces, all...

This week's puzzle was constructed by Evan Mulvihill and Rafael Musa, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Evan is a cruciverbalist living in San Francisco, Calif. His crosswords have been published by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and&nbsp...

Sam Noakes walked to the ring in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Saturday with a wholesome smile on his face and opera music blaring. I wondered why. He was on his way to fight Abdullah Mason to kick off the “Ring IV” main card, the latest attempt to drum up interest in Saudi touris...

This article has been adapted from a piece published Nov. 16 on the author's Substack page.

Last week, after masked settlers torched a mosque in Salfit, set fire to Palestinian trucks in Huwara, and beat farmers bloody during what the U.N. calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence across the West Bank since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements.

So let's investigate the blood-spattered scene of the crime, and by crime we mean the inevitable firing of Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, for which the word crime is probably misplaced.

We know the why, but what about the when? Did Pete Carroll decide to do it at halftime of the Raiders' latest failure against the equally failure-adept Cleveland Browns, when the Pirates With The Swords Through Their Heads were already losing 14-3 and quarterback Geno Smith had been sacked five times? Did it come after the first possession of the second half when the only plays in Cleveland territory were two more sacks and a run for zero yards? Did it come immediately after the game ended, a 24-10 loss that was significantly grimmer than anyone could have imagined even though the two teams entered the game with a combined record of 4-16?

Imagine that you are moss. (Thank you for subscribing to Defector, moss!) You are one of the most ancient types of land plants—older than flowers, older than grass, older than trees, older even than ferns, which are the usual go-to for old plants. Being so old, you're relati...