There is only one possible silver lining to facing down a 31-point deficit in the fourth quarter of a football game, and that is the opportunity to get your young, recently injured, franchise quarterback off the field before anything bad can happen to him. Washington Command...

Baseball makes you feel bad. I don't mean that in a literate sense ripping off Bart Giamatti's lede, the sense of dreading a sullen winter spent longing for the sensory pleasures of the game. I mean that baseball at its best, when the beats are on rhythm and when the high no...

You can take your World Series and push it up your tush. The NFL delivers excitement similar to that of the high stakes, edge-of-your-seat extra inning baseball the Blue Jays and Dodgers gave us last week. But to see the heroics of Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or even...

We were worried for a few moments that the athletic directors/state governors/rich swine who run college football would forget about their seven-week streak of coach firings, but that is a personal failure of faith in the power of administrative bloodlust. They know what mus...

The Toronto Blue Jays sent 57 batsmen to the plate in the 25 hours between Yoshinobu Yamamoto's last pitch of Game 6 of the World Series and his first pitch of Game 7, so it isn't like they didn't have plenty of chances to avert the doom that was ultimately theirs. Indeed, t...

This thoroughly excellent World Series will go seven games because it needs to go seven games. Not "needs to" in the wishful sense employed by my colleague Ray Ratto, the inveterate maximum-sports-wanter—who, by the grace of the blog gods will be in this chair to write the g...

We followed the Owl Whisperer around the gun battery toward a grove of pitch pines, where he had seen the saw-whet owl. Then I heard someone ask behind me, “Where are they going?”

I turned around and saw a couple I had met earlier. My heart sank. I had learned that they were getting into birding and that we lived in the same neighborhood. I wanted to tell them. I really did. I knew how exciting this could be for them. But there was an owl code in New York.

Hear me out: Evan Bouchard is the Oilers' most important player. This does not mean they'd suffer the most if he were removed from the equation; their pair of all-universe forwards obviously qualify there. It also does not mean he's a constant shortcoming holding the team ba...

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. Ray: Good news for SEC teams across the land: The next coach at LSU is almost certainly going...

You might think of Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth, as the story of two animals. 

On the front cover, you see the silhouette of a lone penguin, somewhere in the middle distance, setting off from icy tundra to the mountains. While never made explicit in the text, this image is an obvious reference to a memorable vignette from Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While speaking to a penguin scientist, Dr. Engli, Herzog inquires about the possibility of "insanity in penguins."

It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?

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.

I have to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won’t linger on that washed up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick’s official website. It’s a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick’s weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.

Last year, Defector’s operations geniuses submitted our annual Tip Jar drives for consideration in the Online Journalism Awards category of “Innovation in Revenue Strategy” for mid-size newsrooms. We did not win. The award instead went to the Kyiv Independent for “building a sustainable media business during war.” While we maintain that “sending David Roth to…

Here we go again. Serie A featured last season's best sprint to the finish, with a tight title race, an intense melee for the European spots, and a five-team relegation scrap. Napoli emerged as champions, Juventus snagged the last Champions League spot, and Empoli and Venezi...

To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that across multiple fronts, I’m on the losing team. It is equally difficult not to be overcome by the anxiety that these battles might be marching through my neighborhood and up to my front door any day now.

In an effort to preserve my sanity, I made the decision “unplug” a couple weeks back—no news, no social media updates of egregious political dereliction and moral turpitude. My best friend since age 13 visited from Hawaii for my birthday, and we set about immersing ourselves in art. We started with a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday morning, where we were immediately greeted by white banners hanging ceiling to floor, one of which declared:

The freshwater flatworm Stenostomum brevipharyngium is, by all accounts, a simple fellow. The worm is small and entirely soft. It has no eyes, only sensory pits that control balance and orientation. This simplicity makes it easy for S. brevipharyngium to make more of itself ...

The last time the lasting historical footprint of a World Series was left by the losing team was the night of Carlton Fisk's waved-in homer in Game 6 of the 1975 series. The one before that came when the Chicago White Sox tanked the series for the sake of gamblers ...

All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over—when they break your heart—we want the de...

Wednesday night in Los Angeles it was finally the Blue Jays' turn to benefit from a historic performance. They'd lost Game 2 of this World Series to an unhittable Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who put together nine innings of dominance the likes of which, by at least one measure, had ...

On Oct. 19, American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky was found dead in his Charlotte, NC home. He was a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and his death, which police say is being investigated as a possible overdose or suicide, has rocked the chess world. The U.S. Chess...

Spiders are famous aesthetes. Many craft radially symmetric webs, first extruding long silken spokes and then spinning spiraling strands to snag prey. In the mornings, the intricately laid silk sparkles with dew drops. Your average, generic spiderweb spun by the most run-of-...

Before he was stumbling over interview questions on national TV, before he was the guy who made North Carolina football worse, before you could bet on when he might be fired, Bill Belichick was one of the most respected men in football. It may feel like a lifetime ago, but s...

A superstar slugger cannot be relied on like the take-over-a-game greats in other sports. You can't get him the ball again and again. You can't give him more minutes at the expense of the end of the bench. He needs other guys before and after him in the order to make his con...

Every day brings with it the same threat: the possibility of learning something new about Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold.

The author of an historically malevolent piece of journalism has not been shy about using social media to let us all know how none of her friends like her anymore, on account of all the genocide denial she considers to be her day job. Now she's using it for a different purpose, and that is revealing to the world that she does not understand how to tell, or possibly even recognize, a joke.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

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The best part of the first week of the NBA season is seeing preconceptions built up over a summer spent consuming season previews shattered by the hard reality of basketball games. Heading into this season, one such widely shared preconception was that the Rookie of the Year...

There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though d...

Decades ago, the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos found himself chasing a lizard around an island in the Bahamas. The island was little more than mound of craggy limestone the size of a baseball diamond, and Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in S...

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 recliners, wallets, frozen buttplugs, and more.

Your letters:

It started as it would end, with Freddie Freeman, and then it just kept happening: Dodger after Dodger in extra innings would smoke a potential walk-off home run off of Toronto Blue Jays near-hero Eric Lauer, almost directly to center field, the stadium would roar, and then ...