Let’s get in the solving zone. This week's puzzle was constructed byBen Zimmer (who created our first official Defector puzzle two years ago!), and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Ben is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He has been a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. He's also chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee and vocabulary judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
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. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.
You can't say that the Mariners didn't have their chances Sunday night to clinch a World Series berth. Down 2-0 in the top of the third inning, they had the bases loaded with one out and Cal Raleigh up to bat; he grounded into a double play. Down 4-0 in the top of the fourth...
Nick Saban, ex-Alabama coach but still somehow patron saint of college football, had some things to say during yesterday's edition of College GameDay about the "ugliness" faced by his former coaching peer, James Franklin. Saint Nick wants the world to know that it was "unfai...
Aston Villa will be hosting Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv in a Europa League match in Birmingham on Nov. 6. Last week, The Athletic reported that the West Midlands Police had requested that Maccabi fans be barred from the stadium and prevented from buying tickets to the matc...
I'm sure Lane Kiffin had a good time working through his Kirby Smart material. The jokes at the presser, the pregame shirtless photo, the "timeout clapping" bit when his Ole Miss team was still up—all killer bits. But at some point, when he was workshopping the routine, he f...
Here is a sentence you never want written about your soccer team: Twenty minutes after Saturday's 0-3 loss to Chelsea, Nottingham Forest fired the manager it had hired just 39 days ago.
That's right, Ange Postecoglou is out. His sacking was announced via terse statement from the team just minutes after Postecoglou himself had stepped off the grass at the City Ground. Pity the mid-level Forest executive who was tasked with intercepting the curmudgeonly Australian outside the dressing room and informing him that he no longer had a job. That guy probably got called some rude names, at least one of them starting with the letter "c."
Shohei Ohtani creates a world in which there are no stupid questions. Could there ever be a two-way player in the majors? Could he become an elite power hitter and a frontline starter? Could he recover from two Tommy John surgeries? Could he close out the NLCS with a six-inn...
Earlier this week, I read Horace Walpole’s Castle Of Otronto for the first time. Published in 1764, it’s widely considered the first gothic novel, the cornerstone of a genre that would include future works like those of the Brontë sisters, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and ev...
Our old pal Mike Lombardi just can't keep himself out of the news. Following two reports about how nobody in college football can stand working with him, he is now the subject of another flurry of reports about a preseason fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia.
The news of Lombardi's trip, which took place two weeks before the start of the college football season, was first broken by Pablo Torre. A few hours later, The Athletic provided more details. According to statements provided by UNC, Lombardi's fundraising trip was "exploratory," and did not involve meeting with any representatives of the country's Public Investment Fund. Lombardi, according to the university, merely met with a "Saudi National who is a college football fan interested in supporting Coach Belichick."
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: Some malignant and aggressively stupid sludgesmear with a lopsided head full of festerin...
No matter where you reside along the generational divide, last night provided an object, and in some cases abject, lesson for you and all your youth culture nonsense. The National Football League and Major League Baseball both took their places on America’s viewing devices o...
Tom Cruise and I have one thing in common: We both love eating popcorn at the movies. But I am a blogger, and Tom Cruise is not, so here we are.
Rarely do I go more than two weeks in New York City without seeing a movie, whether it's a new release or a screening of something old. Usually, the experience feels incomplete without a whole lot of popcorn, often all for myself. Over the years, as I've become a repeated customer at film spots around the city, I've built up some knowledge, and some taste, and some routines. Over the past year, I've kept notes on my experiences, trying to get a thing of popcorn at least once from every theater I go to.
Kathryn: Hello, hello, and thank you for voluntarily joining me for some Hades II discussion, absolutely zero peer pressure involved. The game has been out for nearly a month, and in that timespan we’ve all developed very different relationships to it, so shall we elaborate on our approaches first?
Barry: I am actively choosing not to check how many hours I’ve put into this game, out of a certainty that the answer would make me respect myself less as a person. Needless to say, my obsession burned brightly and quickly—this is that rare game that wormed itself so deeply into my brain that I think about it when I’m not playing it. Unsurprisingly, I’m the only one of the three of us who has rolled credits (if not exactly “beaten” it, because the definition of beating Hades is kind of loose; there is always more to unlock).
Since I read it in the run-up to the most recent installment of the reading series I do with Patrick Sauer in Brooklyn, I have recommended Seth Wickersham's book American Kings widely. The book is an excellent biographical history of the quarterback as a concept, job, and cultural construct; it is also weird. This is greatly to its credit, because Wickersham takes some chances with storytelling, structure, and perspective, up to and including his own brief high school quarterbacking career in the narrative, that he could just as easily not have taken. I enjoyed talking to him about the book in Brooklyn, and was happy to pick that conversation back up this week when we welcomed him back to the pod this week.
The start of the NBA season is almost upon us, which means that season preview season is in full swing. The Defector staff preview is coming next week in its usual format, but over at Nothing But Respect, we took a slightly different angle: a detailed look at the season that...
The music channel in Defector's work Slack is, paradoxically or not, a fairly quiet place. People will talk about records they're enjoying or not enjoying, Patrick will reply "type shit" to various stuff, but for the most part everyone is off listening on their own and on their own time. But when D'Angelo died earlier this week at the age of 51, the channel lit up first with the sad stuff you'd expect, and then with memories of our favorite D'Angelo songs and performances and personal memories—all meaningful in urgent and individuated ways, often very different from one another, all anchored by this one uncanny and brilliant artist. Here is some of that music, and what it means to six of us.
I have never cared about my car. The first one I owned, a 2000-something Geo Prizm, came to me by way of my aunt when I was 15 and stayed with me until I moved to New York City when I was 24. It got me through high school and college and the first two years of my post-gradua...
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. went 0-for-7 across the first two games of the ALCS, as his Blue Jays fell into an 0-2 hole at home against the Seattle Mariners. He reached base only once in those two games, an eighth-inning walk in Game 2 with Toronto already down by seven runs; he ended the inning on third. That is not going to do it.
Vladito was the hottest bat of the divisional round, bashing the Yankees to the tune of a 1.609 OPS and three homers in four games. Toronto may not need quite that level of cartoonish production from him to stay afloat against the Mariners, but the job is certainly easier if the team's best hitter is, well, hitting. To wit: The beefy lad seems to have awakened on the cross-continental flight before Wednesday night's Game 3, and now the Blue Jays have a pulse.
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." This is from Psalms 23:4, a classic prayer about God's blessed navigating a world full of sin and evil at every turn. Growing u...
"She's a runner, you a stone." That's a weird thing to say to Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Pat Calhoun, in One Battle After Another, given that the first time we see him in the film, he is in motion, chasing after his fellow members of the left-wing revolutionary group Fre...
In the latest move to consolidate the entirety of human expression onto a single screen, Netflix and Spotify have announced a partnership that will bring 16 of The Ringer’s video podcasts to the platform, barring them from publishing to YouTube.
Netflix has been sweating YouTube’s increasing share of television screentime, and clearly sees poaching 16 popular video podcasts and prohibiting them from streaming to YouTube as a way to encroach on its rival’s core business. But this bizarre deal fundamentally misunderstands why people use these platforms, because rewatching a sitcom is not the same as playing an ambient music video, Netflix is not YouTube, and podcasts are not television.
Brandy: Giri, one of the first things you note in your lovely introductory essay yesterday about this book is Portis’s absolute control and precision. This was my third time reading it and I am always struck by how this book can be so full of little details, so bursting with asides and minor characters and theories and surprising phrases, but still feel restrained.
Kelsey: This was my first time reading this book, and I looked at how thick it is and thought I would read it really quickly. But I found myself reading a little bit of it every day instead of gulping it down. I think that’s because of the precision. Even the tiniest details (the orange pills, the professor’s lecture on tape, the silver, etc.) come back at some point, and that is so satisfying as a reader.
In recent weeks, a steady stream of reports claimed that UEFA, the body that governs European soccer, was seriously considering banning Israel from international play. Off the heels of September's UN commission report that described the death and destruction Israel has wroug...
On Monday afternoon, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter to announce...well, something, anyway, about the direction of the ChatGPT product:
We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made i...
Tyra Banks's eyes are wild. Or maybe they were just always that way, her piercing green-gray irises one of many reminders that right, before she was a TV host and an MLM kingpin and a meme, she was a supermodel. They're darting, they're blinking way too much, they're smizing...
It can be hard to maintain friendships as an adult. People move to new cities, start families, and experience all sorts of other life events that make it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes, you end up losing all of your friends because you can't stop writing pro-genocide ...
Dave Roberts, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has taken great care in these past few years not to act smug or entitled about being the man who guides the best-paid team in American sporting history. That Roberts has more or less pulled it off is one of the great achi...
Jaron “Boots” Ennis did exactly what he needed to do, only faster. In his first fight since moving up to 154 pounds, Ennis knocked out somebody named Uisma Lima just two minutes after the opening bell on Saturday night in front of a hometown Philadelphia crowd to take the WBO interim super welterweight title.
So I think I’m speaking for Ennis’s fans and, hell, anybody who gives a damn about boxing when I say, with all due respect: Nicely done, Boots … NOW GO FIGHT SOMEBODY WE’VE HEARD OF, FOR CRISSAKES!
As a woman about town who loves baseball, I have followed a good deal of these playoffs with my trusty wired headphones, moving from place to place while listening to the games' radio streams on the MLB app. This is fine while there's action on the field, because I appreciat...
