When we last caught up with No. 12 LSU and declared them schedule merchants in for a rude awakening, the Tigers were reeling from an 0-2 start to SEC play and looking ahead to a game against undefeated No. 2 Texas, an even tougher opponent than the Kentucky and Vanderbi...

On Sunday, U.S. Figure Skating announced its Olympic roster, which adhered, as is natural, to the top three performers at its national championships. The men's event saw the most upheaval from the anticipated roster, but not in a way that was particularly interesting for Oly...

The early rounds of the FA Cup are supposed to be straightforward. While every lower-division team that faces Premier League opposition dreams of pulling off the unexpected, these matches tend to look more like Manchester City's 10-1 thrashing of League One side Exeter City ...

The Western Conference's nexus of pain is in an unsurprising location: Sacramento. Let us consider three NBA teams whose seasons have been impinged upon by straying too close to The Beam, whether physically or psychically.

Exhibit A: Houston Rockets

What was your favorite moment from Sunday night's season premiere of Industry?

Was it the opening scene with its pounding New Order needledrop and its unveiling of an all-grown-up Kiernan Shipka aka Sally Draper?

Solve our Monday crossword like nobody's watching. This week's puzzle was constructed by Jonathan Raksin, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Jon is a long-suffering Orioles and Ravens fan living in Philadelphia. His crosswords have previously appeared at Apple News Plus+, Fireball, Universal and The Wall Street Journal. 

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. 

Who says Bari Weiss doesn't know how to run a newsroom? "My general view here," the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador's CECOT concentration camp, "is that we do our viewers the best service by presentin...

Federal agents continued their operations in Minneapolis over the weekend, where they were met with resistance from local residents who do not want to see their communities invaded by masked shitheads who are there to kidnap and kill their neighbors. Groups of people have come together to protest, to chase ICE agents out of their neighborhoods, and to make sure Gregory Bovino can't piss in peace,

In some instances, ICE officers have been defeated by the elements themselves. Nobody got it worse than this fucking guy:

There were two noteworthy injuries in the NBA over the last week, each of which elicited diametrically opposite reactions—one to a multimillionaire player, one to a referee. Guess which injury drew which response if you like, but you're going to be wrong. The injured player...

Hey, I got a new idea for the next baseball game: Instead of hitting the ball, with a bat, I will just have a bunch of guys on my team pick me up and carry me to first base. Knock over the first baseman if necessary. And, oh, here's an idea for the next basketball game: I ca...

You have to feel a little bad for Justin Herbert, who ended Sunday night's 16-3 wild card loss to the New England Patriots by getting treated like a jobber in a Hell In A Cell match. The Patriots' front seven, which sacked Herbert six times, seemed to be trying out various s...

Everybody knows Josh Allen’s as tough as a fast-food steak. That’s how Tim McCarver once described a banged-up-but-game George Brett during a baseball broadcast, and that’s what I was thinking all Sunday afternoon as I watched a banged-up-but-game Allen and his like-minded, ...

The Atlanta Falcons have kicked off another rebuild, and their old quarterback is coming back to help them with it. The team announced Saturday that Matt Ryan will return to the franchise and serve in a newly created role: President of Football. Yep, that's it. Just "Preside...

Comebacks are just what Caleb Williams does. The second-year quarterback drilled DJ Moore with a 25-yard touchdown pass with 1:43 left as his Chicago Bears beat the visiting Green Bay Packers, 31-27, in an unbelievably believable thriller of a wild-card playoff game Saturday night. The Williams-to-Moore hookup capped off the Bears' seventh fourth-quarter comeback win of the season.

Chicago hadn’t won a playoff game since 2011. That sorry skein seemed secure after the first half at Soldier Field, with the Green Bay Packers up 21-3 and moving the ball at will, and the Bears flailing and failing, never more obviously than their 1-for-4 fourth-down conversion rate over the first two quarters.

The Peach Bowl was over by halftime. It felt over after the first play of scrimmage. Oregon quarterback Dante Moore threw a pass intended for Malik Benson, in an attempt to be aggressive at the start of the drive. Bad idea. Indiana corner D'Angelo Ponds jumped the route for an interception, and ran it back 25 yards for a touchdown.

The Ducks had started the game with possession and lost it after only a few seconds. To their credit, they responded with a touchdown catch by Jamari Johnson, but then the Hoosiers' offense finally took the field to put together a touchdown drive—then, later in the second quarter, another. And another. And another. By halftime, Indiana led 35-7, and viewers at home would've been forgiven for doing something else with their Friday night.

A confession: For the past week, I grew convinced that the Carolina Panthers would do it. They had already beaten the Los Angeles Rams once in the regular season, in Charlotte, and this playoff game would be at the same stadium. The weather forecast looked crummy, working ag...

This week, Rolling Stone published an article in which writer Marisa Fox interviewed hostages who were held in Gaza after Oct. 7, talking to them about how music helped them. The artists mentioned in the piece include Frank Sinatra, Bill Withers, and Avenged Sevenfold. What caught my attention was one specific paragraph that was illustrative of the low journalistic standard for writing about Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

The part in question is about 40-year-old Moran Stella Yanai, who was held hostage in Gaza for 54 days before she was released. As you read the following excerpt, your vision might be clouded by some unexplained yellow filter, and the bootleg adhan used in every Hollywood film set in the Arab World will begin to involuntarily play in your head:

What is the point of Unrivaled? Or rather, how seriously should it be taken? It’s easy to understand what the players get out of it: Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart founded the startup basketball league in 2023 as an offseason option for a few dozen WNBA players, offeri...

The Supercopa de España is a bit of a shambolic mini-tournament in the middle of the Spanish domestic season. Since changing the format in 2020—prior to that date, Spain did the normal thing of pitting the winners of the league and the domestic cup against each other in a on...

People are back out on the streets of Minneapolis again, they are barricading the roads and tending curbside memorials, they are asking for someone to make sense of a reckless and unnecessary death at the hands of law enforcement. On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was shot a...

This week researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project announced they have made the kind of breakthrough you might expect from a project with that name: They have potentially identified Leonardo da Vinci's DNA. The announcement ran exclusively in Science on Jan. 6 unde...

Substandard goaltending is not in itself noteworthy, nor even particularly unique this week. On Tuesday, New Jersey's Jacob Markström allowed nine goals on 24 shots, quite possibly the single worst goaltending performance in the NHL's modern era. On Wednesday, St. Louis's Jordan Binnington allowed seven goals, and was intended to be pulled, but his backup wasn't ready, and was later seen looming. Both incidents were fine examples of the exotic dangers of the scariest job in sports. So if you happened to peek at the scoreboard Thursday night and saw the Ottawa Senators had allowed eight goals in a loss to Colorado, you may have wondered: Sure, that's a lot of goals, but are mere goals really enough to command my limited attention? Did the Sens make it weird in any way? Oh, buddy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DTRV13hEr0F/?hl=en

If Miami would've drawn up the ideal scenario for them to come out on top of Thursday night's Fiesta Bowl matchup against Ole Miss, they would've said it needs to be low-scoring, with Miami using the ground and pound game to eat up as much clock and energy on offense as poss...

The ex-girlfriend of Kansas City wide receiver Rashee Rice, Dacoda Nichole Jones, posted 14 photos to her Instagram account on Wednesday, many showing her with bruises on her body, scratch marks, and a broken lip. Jones began the post's caption with "DOMESTIC AWARENESS WARNING!!" The photos also showed a hole in a wall, damage to a cabinet, a closet, and a kitchen. Jones didn't name explicitly name Rice in her post, but she described being in a years-long abusive relationship with a man while living in Kansas and Texas. Rice played college football at SMU before being drafted by Kansas City. Jones and Rice, the Associated Press reported, have two children together.

This is what Jones posted in full, along with the photos:

We at The Distraction HQ do not need much of an excuse to invite ESPN NFL ace and Defector comrade emeritus Kalyn Kahler onto the program. We think she's great at her job and great at talking about it, and the frequency with which she's joined us to speak excitedly about the NFC North and generally "deal with our shit" speaks for itself. But she did make it easy for us this week, with a big, anecdote-rich ESPN story, written with ESPN Raiders reporter Ryan McFadden, on the unusually complicated, surprisingly novel, extremely predictable carnage in the Las Vegas Raiders front office, and sideline, and owner's suite, and I guess also in the offensive line meeting room. Just having to do with the Raiders in general. I suppose one could just write "it is a story about the Raiders" here, in retrospect.

Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the se...

The San Jose Sharks, who own the eighth-best record in the Western Conference, are a top-heavy team with a lot of growing left to do. But my god, what a top. The 19-year-old center Macklin Celebrini, grand prize of the 2024 draft lottery, has launched himself into the mesosp...

By now you've almost certainly seen the video for yourself, or read about it: an ICE agent shooting a Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, in the head from point-blank range, killing her as she attempted to drive away from the scene of an immigration sting where protesters ...

The bad thing about the NBA regular season is that it's too long. The good thing about it is that it's long enough for rich, intriguing storylines to develop. Consider the case of the best team in basketball. One month ago, the dialogue around the Oklahoma City Thunder cent...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

I did not write about it when it happened, but last year there was a bit of a manufactured crisis in rap about the fact that no real rap song had made the Billboard Top 40 for the first time since 1990. The whole topic felt forced, like when ESPN comes up with ridiculously specific stats to fit whatever narrative they want to sell during that particular segment. Rap started as an outsider's genre, so it sounds like a good thing to me to not be apart of Top 40. There's also the fact that most of the biggest pop stars in rap had not dropped much that year: no Drake, no Kendrick, no Travis Scott. And if you look a little below the Top 40, you'll find Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, and NBA Youngboy. It's really not that big of a deal.