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...

Against all odds, something special is happening in Phoenix. The Suns began the season without a first-round draft pick, and with a roster stocked almost entirely with variously limited shooting guards, assorted castoffs, and for some reason the Charlotte Hornets' entire pos...

This time of year will exhaust even the deepest teams. The NHL is taking a three-week break in February for the Winter Olympics, but they didn't expand the start or end of the regular season. As a result, the schedule is crunched, and you could really see the effect over the...

The Los Angeles Clippers and point guard Chris Paul are splitting up. The team is awful. They've lost five straight and eight of nine, and their last three wins—they've only got five total, in 21 games—have come against the Hornets, who are crud, the Mavericks, who are crud,...

I gotta admit, I’m terrible about introducing myself to my neighbors. I’m much more likely to chat with someone who lives on the next street over than on my street. And when the people who live right next door are engaging in potentially chaotic behavior—like blowing their leaves onto the street in front of our place, or attaching something to the shared fence with screws that poke through the wood on our side—I put all my energy into convincing myself that I didn’t see anything. Sure, I’m conflict avoidant, but I’m also a Scorpio. If I allow myself to notice my neighbors’ offenses… baby, you’ve got a feud going! 

This week’s gossip features some friends-of-a-friend who picked up on some tension in their neighborhood and decided to wade right into the heart of it. 

The male comedians are going through something. I know, I know, but this time I'm not referring to the obvious ones who have lost their minds through some excess of steroid abuse and podcast appearances. I'm talking about the more thoughtful class of male comedy: Nathan Fiel...

It is 64 days until the first hockey game of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and the main hockey arena is still under construction. A test event, to determine whether the ice is good enough to play on, has already been pushed back. While provi...

Several months ago, I received a text from my friend Giulia with news that every former musical theater nerd yearns to hear: she had an extra ticket to see a Broadway show. Namely, Chess: The Musical, starring Lea Michele, and did I want to go? Yes, I said, yes, I will, yes!...

Gerald Bourguet, the PHNX Sports reporter who was fired for tweets that accurately laid out right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's beliefs, published a video Monday detailing the aftermath of his firing. It's a horrifying story about what happens to a reporter's life after getting caught in the gears of the conservative grievance machine.

Bourguet's video opened with words for his former employer:

What's a college football season if you don't end it covered in shame? This year was even more shame-drenched than usual, especially if you held the most heralded position on the field: head coach. This season saw more mid-season coach firings than ever before, a knock-on ef...

So far on Only If You Get Caught, the stakes of the competition in most of the situations we have talked about have been limited to winning and losing games. This episode, something much more significant is on the line: true love.

At first blush, a form like reality TV and a show like The Bachelor might seem like an odd subject for a show about breaking the rules. How is it even possible to cheat on a show where the mechanics of competition are simply trying to get the lead to like you? The more cynical-minded might ask, Isn't this all scripted by producers anyway? This episode takes a larger structural look at the show by considering the central concept of the Right Reasons, a mildly coded way to profess that a contestant is on the show out of a genuine quest to find love rather than a cynical attempt to juice their personal brand.

As the new Red Bull Racing upper management remains unwilling to hire a priest to exorcise whatever has been haunting the team's second seat since Daniel Ricciardo departed in 2018 (not dead; simply living his best post-racing life, noticeably bearded and dirt-biking), reaso...

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 trash days, dying in Australia, old man rock, and more.

Your letters:

On Sunday night, fans of French soccer club Nice confronted and reportedly assaulted players at the club's training grounds, hours after the Ligue 1 side lost its sixth straight match. According to a report from The Athletic, around 400 "ultras" showed up to the Nice trainin...

This episode of Nothing But Respect originated from a piece of internal Defector lore: Our colleague Ray Ratto possesses a bounteous and largely unpublicized trove of knowledge about NBA officials. This trove will occasionally reveal itself when someone complains about a call in Slack, only for Ray to respond by hitting them with some Gediminas Petraitis esoterica. He's been loath to write much about it, so we figured we would bring him on the podcast to talk it through.

Here on Nothing But Respect, every week is Rays Week. The three of us traced the history of referees as empowered art critics, groused about the creep of technologification into the practice, and laughed at the formal bios listed on the NBA Officials website. This was a really fun one!

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on November 26.

Given his age when he first came to the world's attention and assuming continued good health in the intervening decade and change, Marine Todd would be in his late 30s today. That would be if he was a real person, though, and Marine Todd was the invented hero in a classic bi...

Pat Fitzgerald, a coaching retread with lots of dirt in the grooves, is about to get another Big 10 gig. 

Among the bigger stories on the latest Bloody Sunday for college football coaches was Michigan State’s allegedly imminent hiring of Fitzgerald, the allegedly disgraced former Northwestern coach. The rumors swirled immediately after MSU fired Jonathan Smith, who went 9-15 in his two years in East Lansing, and Fitzgerald's hire became official on Monday.

Deni Avdija, in his sixth NBA season and second with the Portland Trail Blazers, is suddenly a monster. Sunday night he put up a crazy triple-double against the invulnerable Oklahoma City Thunder, in an encouragingly narrow and competitive home loss for the Blazers. Avdija s...